BWV 825 – Partita No.1 in B-flat Major

Plus: a Caccini family portrait, Yeonjun's vocals, Ross Perlin's multilingual New York, and more!

For his 2024 album Precious Diamonds, Attawapiskat singer-songwriter Adrian Sutherland has gone Nashville. Well: to the extent that it’s possible for somebody already making Neil Young-core “roots rock” to really get any more Southern Rock. He’s been turning in excellent songs in the style since songs like “Magic Hits” and “Scared” on his debut: slide guitar, Hammond organ and everything. So when he leads off promotions for this album with “My Rebel Spirit”—sick harmonica and guitar solos included—it doesn’t feel like much of a musical departure at all. But the title sure does sound more Nashville now.

Except, well, Sutherland is from Northern Ontario, and both “rebel” and “spirit” mean something else entirely when sung by him instead of, say, Kid Rock. Maybe I’m overreading, but it feels like a clever subversion of Country and Southern Rock’s cultural connotations. Lines like “I ain’t ashamed of where I came from” and “I know your kind / Always looking down on me” just hit different when you know the kinds of things that appear on the first page of search results for Attawapiskat.

If you clicked through those links (or already knew), then that might sound like material for a very heavy album indeed. Wonderfully, Precious Diamonds isn’t like that at all. It’s certainly serious, and there’s a melancholy tinge to just about everything on the album. But probably the most directly “current events” song, “You Are Left Behind,” is delivered in a disarming, gentle, major-key package; if the lyrics point to social despair, the music seems instead to look toward the possibility of healing.

Then there are the two Cree-language songs on the album, “Notawe (Father)” and “Kiyash (Before)”—a new direction for Sutherland. It’s not just lyrics: in “Kiyash,” the “pow wow-style” singing of the refrain is the highlight of the song. And in general, Sutherland really does seem to stretch his vocals more in these tracks. He sings with wonderful sensitivity in general, but his default register can start to wear a little thin over time; these tracks, and his experiments with different styles of singing, counter that perfectly. They’re also both just plain pretty. I get why Sutherland is putting “My Rebel Spirit” first, but I hope he continues in this direction. And I can only hope that the music of “You Are Left Behind” turns out to be right, and that there will be less need to sing its lyrics in the coming years.

BWV 825 – Partita No.1 in B-flat Major

i. Præludium

ii. Allemande

iii. Corrente

iv. Sarabande

v. Menuet I – Menuet II – Menuet I

vi. Gigue

Do keep in mind that, as announced, I’m trying to keep things fairly close to “live”—I did these in as close to one take each as possible. So yes, there are a few messes in the Corrente and Gigue especially. 

It’s an odd quirk of being an organist that I’ve gotten 32-odd posts into a Bach series without once writing about a dance suite. Well, you might categorize the Pastorella BWV 590 as a kind of suite, but it doesn’t bear much resemblance to Bach’s other works in the form. (And it’s a piece most of us would prefer to forget about.) But it’s still pretty odd that the only Partitas we’ve encountered so far have been chorale partitas.¹

Think about it: if you play literally any other instrument and include solo Bach in your repertoire, you’re almost certainly going to be playing some kind of suite. If you’re a cellist, all you’ve got to work with are Cello Suites; if you’re a flutist, you’ve got a single Partita. Lutenists and guitarists mostly have suites to work with (even if those pieces were probably written for some kind of keyboard—sorry!). And violinists, of course, have three mammoth Partitas to go with their three Sonatas. Dance suites are the core of Baroque instrumental repertoire. It’s just that the organ, in this context, isn’t really an instrument.

But the harpsichord certainly is, and we’re going to be seeing a lot of suites here. Three big collections (English, French, and these Partitas), the French Overture, and something like a dozen others. Suites are at the heart of the keyboard repertoire. 

Maybe that’s why Bach chose to begin his publishing career with a series of suites. This Partita, BWV 825, was the very first piece that Bach published himself.² And it was just this Partita: the other five were published in following years.³ So for at least a year, this piece was to stand alone as Bach’s first printed musical statement, his calling-card as (reputedly) Germany’s greatest keyboard virtuoso, and a reputation-making publication for a composer whose pieces were much in-demand in manuscript form.

What would you expect from a piece like that? Personally, I would expect something big and flashy. Pull out all the stops (well, that’s just 8’, 4’, and occasionally 16’ on harpsichord): write something impressive, something that shows off your chops as a composer and as a keyboardist. 

That’s not quite what we get. This Partita is certainly difficult, much harder than other printed keyboard music from Germans (even by fellow virtuosi like Handel), and it’s certainly on a grand scale. But it doesn’t blow the doors down. Maybe Bach was worried about sales if the piece looked too hard or oversized.

That’s especially true of the opening. The Præludium ends big, but it’s mostly on the scale of a Well-Tempered Clavier prelude, not one of the big organ preludes, or even the imposing preludes to the last three English Suites. The opening movements of basically all the other Partitas are much bigger, and the first movements of Nos.2, 4, and 6 make this one look positively puny. It’s a relatively slow, thoughtful piece, and it doesn’t even sound good played loud (with the manuals coupled). 

If this Præludium is programmatic in any way, it’s compositional—and somewhat subtle. Bach’s “statement” in this piece might be more obvious by contrast. Take the first movement of Handel’s F-major suite (from a collection published 15 years before Bach’s, and which Bach certainly knew):

These pieces have a fair bit in common, from their emphasis on descending baselines to their rhythmic values. But Handel’s prelude is a relatively straightforward (if florid) song:⁴ the right hand plays the tune and the left hand strums the chords. By contrast, Bach’s has the tune flit around between the voices. It’s not a fugue, and it doesn’t really sound like one, but it has a certain maximalism to it. Each of these parts is important, each one is fully integrated, everything is written out. 

There’s a similar kind of subtle maximalism to the Allemande as well. An allemande is a walking dance, mostly focused on arpeggiating harmonies in a somewhat meandering way. Only, this one meanders way more than most. Starting with arpeggios that cover about half of the keyboard, the piece then gradually rises to the very highest C (about 0:25 on the recording)—and after reaching it, gracefully tumbles down over the next four bars until reaching the keyboard’s lowest C (0:43). Even though the writing is mostly in two parts, there’s a sense of the music filling all of the available space with sinuous lines.

Except: the harpsichord isn’t an organ, and low C isn’t anything like the lower limit. The second half of the piece begins by taking a somewhat dark turn, giving twisted versions of the first half but transposed down by a fourth. Before you know it, the tumbling passage has arrived, and the musical bottom drops out entirely: thonk, it’s a low G (2:42). Bach uses notes this low very sparingly, but when they do crop up the effect is chilling. Momentarily, of course: after all that, it’s only fitting that Bach would end the allemande by climbing all the way back to the top of the keyboard. Gotta make use of all that space—for activities.

This Corrente is the reason that I’m including this piece now and not waiting until my performance of it is a little more cooked through—I couldn’t wait. It’s easily my favorite movement in any of Bach’s suites, and possibly in any of his keyboard works, period. Courantes are always engaging, and often thrilling, but very few of them match the sheer bounce of this piece. (Of course, those of you who’ve met me will say. He likes the dance called “running.”)

Unlike the rhythmically and metrically intricate French courante, an Italian corrente has a tendency to really just run, and this piece is no exception. (Of course, those of you who’ve read any of the prior posts will say. He likes the Italian-style piece.) The entire piece is an almost non-stop string of triplets, buoyed by a Tigger-like left hand (0:14):

What that rhythmic uniformity helps disguise is a certain angularity. Just look at those lines. The right hand is simply all over the place, and the left hand is constantly jumping by awkward intervals of a seventh in order to simulate two parts at once. Later on, the left hand will scurry most of the way up the keyboard (1:29):

And it’ll end up bouncing in place on the exceedingly crunchy interval of a major seventh (1:42):

All of that is fun—but it’s not, I think, what makes this piece so delightful. Rather, those crunches and bouncy rhythms serve as ratchets that Bach can use to jack up the tension (first 25 seconds). And once it’s at a maximum, he can slowly let the air out of the balloon (sorry to mix metaphors) with a truly glorious sequence (0:25):

After all those harsh dissonances, and all that hard work for the player, the music gives way to 10 bars of pure Italian sunshine. Beautifully smooth triplets in both hands for three measures, and then the return of Tigger for the remainder. What a payoff.

If Sarabandes are famous for anything, it’s their distinctive rhythm, often characterized as “strong two” or at least “long two”: instead of fitting a normal ONE-two-three ONE-two-three pattern, they often look like one-TWO-three or one-two-[rest]. This makes their performance very tricky: how do you avoid making one-TWO-three one-TWO-three not just sound like ONE-two-three ONE-two-three with an upbeat?

Part of the solution, I’m given to understand, is a better understanding of the dance itself. (Remember that these are all, at least originally, dances.) Rather than having a “strong two,” thinking of the second beat as a big lift helps avoid the sense of “two downbeats” or a “false downbeat.”⁵ That can really help when performing music that looks like this:

Remember that on the harpsichord, more notes usually just equates to louder—and lower notes are often louder too. But if you think of the second beat as a big, poofy lift, you can start to make sense of the rhythm, with the second chord functioning almost as an extended arpeggiation of the first.

Mostly. Bach is also definitely messing with the rhythm here, perhaps as a challenge to the player. The climax of that rhythmic play comes in this measure (2:20):

The tied-over note in the left hand means that only two new notes are played on the downbeats. Followed by six attacks (including a thudding low octave) on the second beat. This measure is almost like a test of how well you can communicate (and maintain) the rhythmic pattern—your ability to make what ought to be an accent disappear.

Speaking of rhythmic play—hold on, what’s that you’re saying, David Schulenberg?

Maybe you could say that about the first minuet (although the left hand is quite mobile for a “beginners” piece), but this comment utterly undersells the second minuet (1:30):

OK, so it sounds pretty simple, and it’s extremely straightforward melodically; the first half is basically the same thing twice. But look at these rhythms!! This piece is crazy! 

Somewhat infamously, minuets take place at two simultaneous speeds. The dance is half as fast as the music, so you could think of it as occurring in rhythms of three half notes while the music moves three quarter notes at a time. From the perspective of the music, that discrepancy creates an odd rhythmic phenomenon, where the big movements happen on ONE-two-THREE one-TWO-three. You might know this kind of thing as hemiola.

It’s traditional for minuets to at least nod at hemiola, usually by having the last few measures of a section suddenly switch to groupings by half notes instead of quarters (“cadential hemiola”). But occasionally a composer will take the effect and use it over a whole piece. Mozart is probably the most famous example, in the Menuetto from his “Great” G-minor symphony K.550. That piece is so intricate that it took a 33-page article by Rick Cohn to untangle what’s going on with its rhythm.

This Menuet II isn’t quite as complex as Mozart’s—at 16 measures, how could it be?—but its rhythmic subtleties are still extremely rich. The action’s mostly in the left hand: look at the ties. Sometimes, they produce a simple hemiola. Other times, they act like a suspension, a note on the third beat that leans its way into the downbeat with a little dissonance. But sometimes they could be either—or both. The whole movement is perched on a knife’s edge, and the most subtle inflection can completely reshape how you hear the rhythm. There are dozens of possibilities, all valid and worth exploring. Nothing simple about it. But “surprising”: yes, absolutely.

Nothing simple about the Gigue either. Probably the most famous fact about the Six Partitas is that each is in a different key, has a different kind of opening movement, and uses a different time signature in its Gigue. Maybe buyers of the first partita could have seen that last part coming: why else would Bach use 𝄴 , 4/4 time for a jig? You’d expect 6/8, 12/8, or (if we’re getting really frisky) 9/8; perhaps one of those with a 16 instead of an 8. But 4/4 with triplets? That’s unusual.⁶

And this piece barely sounds like a jig either. It’s certainly nothing like the last movement of Brandenburg 6, with its country-fiddler style. Instead, it sounds kind of like a Scarlatti sonata, hand-crossings and all. If Bach is showing off anywhere in this Partita, it’s here; he barely writes anything else like this before the Goldberg Variations. It’s also harmonically much more complex than anything else in the piece. Even though it’s in a major key, almost every measure of this Gigue is inflected by a sighing descending half-step that hints at the parallel minor. Really, the whole piece sounds like it’s going to end minor to me, until it suddenly doesn’t.

And then there are those diminished seventh chords:

Starting in m.34, that’s the same exact chord being played down one half-step lower in each measure. Until the increment becomes a whole step (m.40). The effect is like finally getting kicked out of a never-ending loop. A whirlwind ending to a 

What I’m Listening To

Nicolas Achten and Scherzi Musicali – Il Concerto Caccini

I don’t normally say this, but: watch the video first. It’s not just marketing fluff: it really does explain a whole lot of what’s going on with this album. (There are English subtitles available.)

Done watching? OK, now let’s talk.

You probably noticed a couple things. One would be how splendid the recording sounds, even in little snippets like this. The singers are in great voice throughout, with a nice full sound but still delivering their ornaments with magnificent suppleness. The only knock I might have is that there are rarely very dramatic high points. But that’s probably an anachronistic thing to demand from this repertoire. You can hardly fault a performer of early settecento Italian music for performing with sprezzatura. 

And yet, I’m not actually sure if “the singing sounds great!” is actually what they want you to take away from this video. I think they want you to say something like: “Wow, all those instruments!” It might have seemed like a gimmick. Maybe it is.

Even if they’re being used to show off, garner eyeballs, or just plain have fun, I have to say that the wide range of instruments really does pay dividends for this album. Achten basically says as much in the video: this is an album about the joyous possibilities available in the early seventeenth century for accompanying singers with basso continuo. Plush pillows of plucked strings (including, for a change, harps), thick smears of lirone and gamba, gentle plumes of organ (properly sized for once)—and sure, some nice harpsichords too. Who knows which of these possibilities might have actually been used for a given piece, but it’s really splendid to hear the whole menu of options. (And the full consort sounds phenomenal on the larger-scale intermedio Il Rapimento di Cefalo.)

As for the music itself, I actually find it a little hard to know what to say. I think Giulio Caccini is an excellent composer for voice, with some really nice pieces. I also think his daughters are fabulous composers. But listening to their music together gives me the uncomfortable sense that I still (even after over a decade of intensive study and performance of early seventeenth-century music!) don’t really live in this style. What I’m trying to avoid saying is: I can’t pick out who is who.

I don’t want to admit it. Partly because, paradoxically, that kind of comment gets tossed around as a compliment often enough. But I’d like to avoid that: it’s awfully backhanded to make the best thing you say about a composer “she sounds just like a man!—even when (in this case) it’s a specific man, one who presumably taught her how to compose. It would be nice to be able to say that this is an Orazio/Artemisia Gentileschi situation, where the daughters clearly learned a lot from the father but then grew to blow his work out of the water. But I don’t want to misrepresent the music.

Rather, in the case of Francesca and Settimia Caccini, their work—especially as represented by the excellent selection here—frankly seems exactly as good as that of their father, because they demonstrate an equally complete mastery of exactly the same style. Pieces like Francesca’s “O vive rose” and “Lasciatemi qui solo” or Settimia’s “Due luci ridenti” have spectacular expressive power and memorable tunes—in basically the same ways as Dad’s music. (And in ways that are very similar to, but distinct from the monodies of a composer like Monteverdi—I can tell them apart.) All three are wonderful composers. Disk 2 is just as rewarding of a listen as Disk 1. Maybe I should just be glad that Achten isn’t making us choose. Scherzi Musicali treat all of this repertoire (and even the fake “Caccini” Ave Maria) with the same reverence and creativity, and that by itself is wonderful to hear. 

Muddy Gurdy – Seven

I’m not ashamed to play favorites with record labels.⁷ This is the third release from Buda Musique that I’m hyping up this year, and the previous two are among the albums I’ve waxed most lyrical about. (If you haven’t listened to Ann O’aro yet, drop everything and do so immediately.) Similarly, I make no bones about favoring harmonia mundi’s extraordinary catalog of vividly-performed early music, Matador’s brand of lush, rhythmically grounded indie rock, Kairos’s selection of intense, sonically-detailed contemporary music, or SM Entertainment’s commitment to big vocals and weird harmonies. Some A&R teams just have it, and I appreciate a label with a distinctive sonic identity.

But what is Buda’s identity as a label? If they’re famous for anything, it’s probably the Éthiopiques series, a treasure trove of obscure archival recordings that have brought dozens of great artists to light. That’s not unrepresentative, since they are a “world music” label with a focus on Africa. But for my money they’re not quite like other world music labels. (And not just because they have such a great ear for musicians, although that’s definitely part of it.)

The world music industry, by and large, has a tendency to fall into two kinds of pitfalls. One is emphasizing the “world” part, marketing music mainly by where it’s from and not who made it. Take a look at the packaging for albums by Lyrichord, Ocora, or the justifiably famous Nonesuch Explorer Series:

This is a great recording, but the album art doesn’t want to tell you anything about the musicians. Instead, you surely just want to know the culture in question, and the minimum of information about genre or instruments:

It’s just like the (thankfully disappearing) museum exhibits that will put creator labels next to all the Western artworks (even “unknown” or “anonymous”) and none next to the “world art” (even when we do know).

The other pitfall is, well, the other kind of world music, which is to say a lot of what I like and write about here. Last post, I was telling you all to go and listen to this album:

The alternative to “anonymous world musician” is very often to place that musician front and center—but in the context of a “fusion” album that represents more of the “world” than just where they’re from. 

Buda usually avoids these pitfalls. (Other labels that do, like Piranha Musik, focus mostly on global popular musics.) Even in their most straightforward “traditional music” recordings, they avoid ethnographic anonymity and put the artists’ names and photos above where they’re from.

(This album is fantastic! Listen to it!)

And when they do “fusion” albums it’s never blasted in your face to the same degree. You can listen to Muddy Gurdy’s whole album without realizing that this is a trio of White French people from Auvergne who went to Louisiana to make roots records. 

Well, that’s probably a stretch. You might not figure out the Auvergne part, but between the band name and the very first notes of the album, you’ll figure out that this album prominently features vielle and hurdy-gurdy. And you’ll very quickly start hearing zydeco sounds, followed by proto-blues juré music, and of course straight blues. 

That’s a heady mix already—blues hurdy-gurdy is truly something to behold—but for me the big discovery of the album is the Comanche funk of Big Chief Juan Pardo. Muddy Gurdy do contribute on this track—the guitar work is stellar, as is the drumming—but Pardo pretty handily outshines them. (As do the Broussard sisters on the juré track.) But that’s hardly a knock on them—it’s a standout feature on a great album. I’m just glad that they, and Buda, put it together.

julie – my anti-aircraft friend

I’ll be honest. This album is fantastic, but I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what makes it stand out from the pack of post-shoegaze, post-grunge, post-punk, post-stuff that continues to crop up in droves. I can name some factors: the drumming is great, the guitars have cool Sonic Youth-style effects, the songs often have more of a “plot” than others in this style. Still, if you told me they’re not doing anything that Parannoul hasn’t, I don’t think I would object. Maybe it’s the vocals that set it apart?

I’m just kidding, I know exactly why this album grabbed my attention. Look at track 9:

And then look at its Genius annotation:

How could I resist that?

It helps that it’s a really good song; the sectional format is varied without becoming incoherent. And I’m actually glad I listened to it first. The first half of this album, dominated by singles like “catalogue,” “very little effort,” and “clairbourne practice” is excellent, but a little bit samey; those songs are all practically the same tempo, rhythmic groove, and vibe. “piano instrumental” is an equally good song, but also a real contrast. Basically: this song shows that julie have range in addition to talent. And a prank title like that is just enough of a sense of humor to set them apart from the often deadly serious crowd of post-whatever musicians. Can’t wait for “organ instrumental” next.

YEONJUN – “GGUM”

The Big Three K-pop labels, notoriously, each train their artists to have a very distinctive vocal tone. So distinctive that, in one of K-pop Youtube’s great virtuoso performances, Chuther was able to do spot-on impressions of each label’s hits in the house style of the other two:

She explains it well enough, but the basic idea is that SM favors big, bright resonance, YG likes a somewhat covered sound with lots of little scoops and slides, and JYP (as they proudly proclaim) teaches its singers to use “half air, half sound.” None of them invented these styles; they’re respectively derived from musical theater, R&B, and 90s pop. But by keeping a consistent vocal training staff and house aesthetic, each one has been able to turn the sound of their idols’ vocals into part of the company brand.

Of course, K-pop no longer has a Big Three. Ever since BTS’s Big Hit leveraged its market position and started buying up smaller labels, the resulting conglomerate HYBE has taken a plurality of a K-pop market share. Where are the videos parodying the vocal styles of the Big Four?

At face value, such a video would be impossible, because HYBE doesn’t really have a house vocal style. That makes sense if you think about the company’s history, the result of recent buyouts and mergers.⁸ Why should Pledis and Source artists have the same vocal sound if they’ve only been under the same umbrella for four years?

And yet, in another sense, HYBE has a very distinctive vocal sound. Only this time it’s not singing technique. It’s vocal processing.

The label acquisition process may make for a disparate array of vocal techniques under HYBE, but it has given some striking demonstrations of the conglomerate’s “house style” in action. Listen to fromis_9’s last single under Off the Record Entertainment:

And compare that to their first single under Pledis (newly acquired by HYBE):

There’s pitch correction all over “We Go,” and it’s reasonably obvious when it comes to the worst singers. (Saerom’s vocals, as usual, can be a bit brutal.⁹) But it’s nothing compared to the downright crispy vocals on “Talk & Talk.” Even the best singers in the group—take Jiwon’s verse right at the beginning—are Autotuned into absolute oblivion here, with the high notes so smoothed out that they almost blend into the synths. And this isn’t the work of just one production team; everything they’ve put out since 2021 has had varying degrees of computer-voice; just listen to the opening of 2023’s “Prom Night.” 

It’s also not one group. You can hear the same hyper-processed vocals in songs by Jungkook, LE SSERAFIM, NewJeans, TWS, and, well, every other HYBE artist. And, to be fair, the effect isn’t just vocal smoothing and pitch correction; there are massive compression artifacts all over a lot of these songs. You can hear them on the hi-hats in the pre-chorus to “FEARLESS” (the LSFM song linked above)—same weirdly “airless,” crunchy sound. 

Does this bother me? Obviously not too much; I wrote 1500 words about how much I like fromis_9 last month, and another 1000 about how much I liked Jungkook’s album last year. I haven’t had the chance to say anything really nice about LE SSERAFIM since their post-UNFORGIVEN falloff, but I love that album. Clearly compression artifacts can’t ruin a song, for me at least. (These groups are popular enough—literally BTS—that I think it’s safe to say the same for most listeners as well.)

Still, it can be jarring, and I really do appreciate groups like STAYC (or rather, producers like B.E.P.) that use pitch correction, smoothing, and compression mostly as special effects instead of slathering them all over everything. The latter feels like a weird fixation, a kind of over-perfectionism, when we know perfectly well that listeners are completely happy to hear vocals that are kinda flat for most of a song; Americans were fine with that from The Supremes in 1964, Koreans were fine with it from S.E.S. in 1997, and just about everybody seems to have been fine with it in the chorus of TWICE’s “What is Love” in 2018. “Kinda flat” can even be part of the song’s charm.

And every now and then, HYBE comes out with vocals so crazily processed that I have to check my Spotify audio settings to see if I’ve left my streaming quality on “podcast low” instead of “very high.” The nice thing this time was realizing that it’s intentional.

It’s funny how being reframed as an artistic choice can change how you perceive an effect. In the verses, “GGUM” isn’t really much more processed than any other HYBE track—although, like, I swear I hear compression artifacts in Yeonjun’s breathing—but the crazy helium-voice effects in the chorus make those verses fit in completely.¹⁰ Now they just sound like part of his exploration of a huge range of timbres and pitch levels. 

Take the prechorus (“Go hit that ggum chilgung”): whatever the opposite of helium voice is, we get a healthy dose of that here. The harmonies Yeonjun creates with pitch-shifting software are delightful—a lot of them are based on parallel fourths and sevenths, which combine with the already uneasy two-chord progression to give a delightfully uncanny effect. If this song’s beat went just a little harder, if it had just a bit more of a hook, it would easily be among my favorites for the year.

When I was brainstorming what I might have to say about “GGUM,” I had the disturbing realization that all of the same comments might apply to a song that will definitely not be among my favorites for the year:

I like a lot of Megan’s music (including in her weeb phase), and I even think that RM has recently shown some glimmers of his former rapping ability. But, as they say, this ain’t it. Forget about the lyrics, which are…not good. The question is, What the hell did they do to Namjoon’s voice? And why do I hate it when I love Yeonjun’s song?

It’s not like it’s just about the difference between raising and lowering pitches; like I pointed out above, Yeonjun’s song has both. But “GGUM” is much more about raising, and I think for a reason. Giving himself higher-pitched options allows Yeonjun to explore the center of the human vocal range; lowering takes him down to one of its extremes. He also explores, shifting himself to a ton of different pitch levels. And that creates a variety of different vocal timbres in the process.

RM’s verse has, well, none of that. It’s monotonously (almost literally one pitch) delivered at a lowered pitch that doesn’t contrast with Megan’s rapping any more than his regular voice would. The resulting timbre is kinda muddy and certainly not interesting like Yeonjun’s are. And I can’t shake the feeling that the lower pitch is supposed to make him sound, well, Blacker—for rap credibility, I guess. It would be ironic if whoever was involved in this decision decided that RM had to become Black at the same time that Megan is trying her best to become Asian. Was this song an attempt to meet in the middle?

Also liked…

Floating Points – Cascade

Superfónicos – Renaceré

George Burton – White Noise

Ibrahim Maalouf – Trumpets of Michel-Ange

Vilde Frang with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin - Elgar: Violin Concerto Op.61

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

A Moving Sound 聲動 and ETHEL  – The Wheel of Life

What I’m Reading

In some ways, it’s impossible to tell what kind of book Ross Perlin’s Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York wants to be. In others, it couldn’t be more obvious. 

Start with the impossible. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the books that Language City tries to be: a history of New York, an introduction to linguistics, a memoir, a pro-immigration manifesto, a history of one specific organization (we’ll get there), a series of profiles of six New Yorkers, and an airport-bookstore nonfiction hit. The book, by the way, is 350 somewhat generously spaced pages.

The shocking thing is the degree to which Perlin succeeds in doing some version of each of those projects. If nothing else, this is one of those books that’s just a gleeful storehouse of facts, fun facts even, about everything reasonably relevant to the topic. (If you want a sampler, the NYRB review gives many of the best ones.) That’s a good way to make for airport-bookstore sales, and to give some sense of uniformity to otherwise exceedingly disparate chapters. If the chapters introducing linguistics concepts are just as full of little nuggets as the historical chapters on New York or journeys to Central Asia, then at least they feel like part of the same project.

And, like I said, that project is extremely well-telegraphed: this book is one giant ad for the Endangered Language Alliance; I’m sure it’s boosted their fundraising numbers, or at least I hope it has. OK, so I’m being a little disingenuous, since Perlin is really stumping for the principles that ELA stands for—what he calls “radical linguistics.” (Although: I don’t think any of the linguists I’ve met would find anything remotely radical about it.) The fight for language documentation and revitalization is incredibly daunting, and requires both enormous amounts of labor and awareness among communities that are almost definitionally among the hardest to reach out to. ELA could use a boost.

If you see the book as an ELA manifesto or ad, its heterogeneous contents start to make a lot of sense. The capsule history of New York is part history of the present (and we all know how much New Yorkers love to get “The Rest of the Story” about whichever street they live on), part lament for what’s been lost. The personal memoir is (I think?) intended to be inspirational for those who want to do the same work. The introduction to linguistics mostly seems meant to instill awe about linguistic complexity and diversity; I didn’t really notice Perlin relying much on terminology introduced there in the later chapters, although I’m probably a very bad person to judge that. And of course the book’s politics stems directly out of Perlin’s admiration for multilingual, and multicultural cities.

Most of Language City is taken up with the six profiles. I assume he had more than six to choose from, but maybe that’s not true. If he didn’t, it’s pretty lucky that he landed on such variety; all from different language families and mostly from different continents. Moreover, they address substantially different issues, from writing systems (N’ko) to syntax (Seke) to revitalization (Lenape). This means that there is necessarily some unevenness. Rasmina’s chapter (Seke) gets pride of place as the first profile, and is almost twice as long as the others. Unfortunately, the chapter that follows it—Husniya’s chapter, on Wakhi—seems the odd one out, both in its rough geographic proximity to Seke and in its seeming lack of an organizing topic. 

Both of those chapters (along with N’ko and Lenape) make for somewhat odd bedfellows with the ones on Yiddish and Nahuatl. Certainly, Yiddish and Nahua could use a boost, the latter especially in New York, but their state of endangerment is nowhere near that of Lenape or Seke. Seke has fewer than 5,000 native speakers left; Nahua has a million and a half. (I won’t spoil what the book reveals about the remaining speakers of Lenape.) Yiddish and Nahua are also (both by virtue of sheer numbers, history, and their ties to major immigrant communities in the U.S.) orders of magnitude more visible, known, and well-studied than the others. Maybe that’s part of the point—“we work with all endangered languages”—but I’m worried that putting these vastly different situations together like this has a flattening effect.

Still, that’s a minor quibble, and probably not one that most of the book’s (intended) readers will have. There are a couple howlers (I noticed one or two wrong tonemarks—I blame a copyeditor—and a dubious assertion that Chinese is primarily monosyllabic), but the book is mostly quite well-documented, proudly sporting footnotes that may get some of its airplane-bookstore readers in way over their heads. (Main-text Perlin worries that his readers will be confused by phonetic bracketing conventions; footnote Perlin confidently sends them off to read Alexandra Aikhenvald’s survey of evidentials for practicing linguists.) Really, those notes just display the same attitude that pervades the rest of the book: an infectious joy in sharing a lifetime’s worth of tidbits about language, New York, and a lot else. Even if you know a lot about any of those things, it’s still a great time.

A few others:

• Quanta – Special Issue: The Unraveling of Space-Time

• Block Club Chicago – Wrigley Field Ballhawks Now An Endangered Species As Fewer Baseballs Reach The Streets

• Engelsberg Ideas – A little history of the anchovy

• NY Review of Books – China’s Iconoclast (Ian Johnson on Liu Xiaobo)

• Brooklyn Paper – Haus of Ellie: Meet the minds behind NY Liberty’s viral elephant mascot

• Hakai – The Poachers Who Could Save Mexico’s Vaquita

• Them – How ‘Rez Ball’ Assembled Its Dream Team of Indigenous Ballers

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. If you’re wondering about the relationship between “suite” and “partita,” let me quickly quote myself from that post:

In that context, you know exactly what “partita” means: it’s a synonym for “suite.” Which, if you think about it, just means “sequence.” (When Couperin uses the term “ordre” instead, it’s a pretty close synonym.) So that kind of partita is a more or less set sequence of dance types. Allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue, you get the deal.

2. The cantata Gott ist mein König BWV 71 was published by the Mühlhausen town council, not the composer.

3. The original advertized plan was for a total of seven, but it seems that the seventh became the French Overture.

4. This is not a value judgment: truth be told, I would rather listen to this suite than any of Bach’s.

5. I owe this explanation to Brent Wissick.

6. Of course, if you know the Sixth Partita, you’ll know that 𝄴 is far from the least unusual time signature Bach tries for a jig.

7. Just like, for that matter, I have no qualms about linking to articles from Hakai and LRB in seemingly every post.

8. Kakao Entertainment’s subsidiaries manage IVE, STAYC, IU, Apink, and MONSTA X, so there’s an argument for a “Big Five” in K-pop—but Kakao’s sublabels are even more independent than HYBE’s.

9. AND WE LOVE HER FOR THAT.

10. The same could happen in fromis_9’s “Prom Night” (linked above), but the effects aren’t pervasive enough—the vocals are only really chopped up in the pre-chorus and in the backing to the chorus. I definitely don’t think the opening robot-voice autotune was intended to match those.