We're Back! BWV 846 – Prelude & Fugue in C Major from Well-Tempered Clavier Book I

Plus: Charli xcx, Mabe Fratti, EVERGLOW vs. H1-KEY, Typing in Chinese, and more!

We’re completely online now, so the idea of a “digital land acknowledgement” seems a little ridiculous. But I’m very happy to keep exploring Indigenous musics here, and I love how putting this section first leads to these links getting the most clicks. So here they’ll stay. 

I’m in New York now, and realizing that there are zero Lenape musicians on my radar. Easy enough to fix, and to turn up Cisko Gower of HGS Savage Fam (“Higher Groundz of Struggle”), even if he/the group seem mainly to be active on the West Coast now. (We “love” a Soundcloud bio that shouts out I-5.) As you might expect from such an underground production, HGS Savage Fam are pretty hit-or-miss, but their videos look a lot better than you might expect: take a look at “Fair Warning.” While you’re there, take a moment to listen to the actual song too. Sure, the beat is basic, but these guys have something as MCs—especially Cisko. (He’s the one with the facial hair.) Given how much HGS put out (Spotify has albums from 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, plus a bevy of singles), I imagine this is somewhat lightly edited material, basically freestyling; but for all that, Cisco’s flow and rhymes are good. So on a song like “Stoodis,” Cisco’s first verse might lose a little bit of steam in the middle, but you can hear that he has a pretty deep bag of rhythmic tricks, and he’s good at switching things up when it might get repetitive. I kind of love his combination of punchy and laid-back (almost mumbled) delivery. And as for the lyricism—well, take a listen to “Native & Proud.” HGS don’t make it hard to see their vision.

BWV 846 – Prelude & Fugue in C Major from Well-Tempered Clavier Book I

I guess I didn’t have to begin with this piece. After all, with Bach at Bond, I purposefully decided just to start in medias res, indeed with the recital that probably contained the fewest name-brand “hits” out of any in the series. But then again, no organ piece has quite the symbolic cachet of this Prelude and Fugue.¹ Where else would you begin?

Because of that cachet, this piece’s sheer fame—there are individual performances of it that have more Spotify streams than any song by Sonic Youth²—it might not be possible to say anything new about the C-major prelude. So, for my own sanity, I’ve purposefully avoided (re)reading what’s been written about it. I’m sure I’ll be repeating insights from Alfred Dürr, David Schulenberg, Heinrich Schenker (sorry!), and Donald Francis Tovey here, but at least they’ve had some time to percolate since I read them. 

To my mind, there are two temptations to avoid when talking about this piece. The first—probably not something you can say in polite society—would be along the lines of: “Oh come on, that piece is so basic. We all played it as children. It’s so simple, the same thing over and over again!” The other (perhaps generated in compensation for the first via Newton’s Third Law) would be to insist on some transcendental qualities to this music, deep subtleties that people in the first camp just don’t get. It’s BACH, don’t you see? This must be the most profound music ever!

Shockingly, having now set up this fictitious dichotomy, I will now declare it to be false. This piece is basic, it is for kids, it is simple. It’s just a bunch of chords—take a look at the earlier version that Bach included in the notebook for Wilhelm Friedemann (confirmation that this is truly Kidz Bach):

But it’s also quite subtle. This piece has some very nifty tricks up its sleeve.

The one that interests me most has to do with the prelude’s phrase rhythm. Here is a score that I’ve somewhat hastily and impressionistically color-coded for degrees of dissonance:

I’ve made the images small because I don’t really want you to read the music. Just look at the pattern instead. Basically, I’m using red for “especially crunchy” chords (major and diminished 7s), orange for “dissonant” (minor 7s and some suspensions), and yellow for mostly consonant dominant 7 chords, which still “want” to resolve on the next downbeat. 

The idea here is that more dissonant sounds, like certain colors, are more vivid and leap out as a kind of accent. So you can see a certain kind of visual “arc” to certain passages, where (for instance), the first four measures start calm, build suspense, and then gradually relax again. In other passages (e.g. mm.12–15), there are obvious “pairs” of measures, strong-weak, strong-weak, color-white, color-white. Most of the last page (mm.24–end) is taken up with a series of such pairs. 

But hang on. Why am I starting those pairs on even-numbered measure? The piece starts on measure 1! Am I hearing those passages “backward”?

I’m not in Bach’s head, so I can’t rule that possibility out. What I can say is that, in each of these cases, I’m putting the more dissonant measure first, preferring a “strong-weak” grouping. But maybe that’s anachronistic, or due to some kind of bias on my part. (I certainly prefer, all else being equal, to hear phrases as beginning strong.)³ Still, I think I can defend this interpretation, and even identify the point where things change polarity, where the groups go from odd-first to even-first. 

Defense first. Listening to this piece, you might feel a certain degree of “cyclicality,” the sense that Bach keeps returning to the same patterns. This color-coded score can help make that easier to see. For instance, notice how a “red-orange-yellow-white” pattern recurs in mm.8–11 and mm.16–19. That’s not just an artifact of the coloring: mm.16–19 is exactly the same music as mm.8–11, transposed down a fifth. And they’re both almost identical to the chords in the first four measures (white-orange-yellow-white), albeit with the crucial substitution of an extra-juicy (red) first measure. These are four-measure phrases, and they begin on even measures.

So that means the entire piece* from measure 8 on is in a kind of “strong-weak,” EVEN-odd rhythm. How did we get there? Given that the first phrase is a nice, round four bars, we only have a three-bar span—measures 5, 6, and 7—in which the “flip” could happen. Which one is it?

There’s no single definitive answer—this is definitely a moment where you can say this piece is deeply subtle—but I’d actually say that it happens in none of them. None of them are “extra” measures, for instance, and none of them is so strongly accented that it’d prompt a hypermetrical transition on its own. 

Instead, what I hear happening is a gradual shift to “even-first.” First, the juicy major seventh chord in m.8—the first red-colored bar in the piece—is so striking that it might initiate a kind of “reset” by itself. (It certainly makes me want to stop and smell the roses, which has an agogic effect.) But more saliently, it begins that four-measure phrase, the “red-orange-yellow-white” pattern I pointed out above. By the time that’s over, you’re definitely hearing m.11 as an ending, and m.12 as a strong beginning. 

The fun part is, Bach makes this shift happen almost naturally. (So natural, in fact, that it’s probably not the result of any conscious “compositional” decision.) You can probably hear that mm. 5–6 have the same “shape” as mm.7–8—that they form a sequence. But, simply because a C major scale isn’t completely homogeneous (this whole piece is basically just a long descending C major scale in the bass), the dissonant chord that you land on in m.8 is just a lot crunchier than the one in m.6, and wants a different kind of resolution. It’s a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don’t situation: you could write m.9 to be a closer analogue to mm.5 and 7 (e.g. just an A minor chord instead of a 7th chord), and that would keep the “odd-first” phrasing intact. But it would sound pretty weird as a resolution of m.8, or at least less natural than the existing m.9. (If you want to hear the difference for yourself, play the piece with m.9 repeated: on the first repetition, play As instead of the Gs. You’ll find that the piece as a whole feels a little bit more locked-in, but that first version of m.9 will sound a little odd.)

So, that’s a passage in which each chord is followed by its most “natural” (or at least conventional) successor, but as a result, the whole 7-measure segment induces a metrical flip that leaves you feeling a little bit disoriented. To my ear, the following eight bars mostly work to ease that sense of disorientation. Even as they introduce new and colorful sonorities (diminished seventh chords), they’re business as usual when it comes to meter. You may also notice that, at the end of those eight measures (m.19), we’ve landed back home, in C major. The first half of the piece is over.

What about the second half? And what about that asterisk* above?

Well, you probably noticed a big patch of red on the second page of the score. Even more than the first half, the second begins with a real sense of disorientation. Each of the three chords marked in red would naturally lead to a G major chord, and yet only the last one actually does so. By the time it rolls around, we’ve had the rug pulled out from under us twice. It’s easy to doubt that the music will ever resolve. 

It does, of course. After those three measures, we land on the long G pedal that will last from m.24 until basically the end of the piece. (Long Gs deserve triple-length preparations?) And, just as in the first half, the measures following the moment of metrical uncertainty are much more “normal,” giving a long succession of harmonies that naturally pair as strong-weak (yellow-white, orange-yellow, etc.). After all that disruption, it’s good to have some time to recover our bearings.

1250 words in and I still haven’t talked about the fugue. I’ll be brief, or at least briefer.

If you were reading for a while during Bach at Bond, you might remember that I like to analogize organ fugues⁴ to a promise or threat. After all, the structure really does have that promissory flavor: “Hear this tune? I’m going to make it play among a bunch of other parts, and then the feet are going to have to do that.” Organ fugues are public pieces, designed to be intelligible and (usually) showy. 

Keyboard fugues may have the same basic structure—the same tune is going to be played in different parts alongside a changing cast of musical characters—but they’re designed for learners and connoisseurs, so they don’t have to be as audibly intelligible. Bach even sometimes hides entrances of the subject! You have to be looking at the score to figure these pieces out.

That’s at least the standard narrative about keyboard vs. organ fugues. I think it’s more or less true, but it can lead us to exaggerate the degree to which keyboard fugues like this one are still designed to be comprehensible by ear. Take the subject:

This tune is clearly broken up into four different segments, each of which is very easy to pick out if you’re listening for it. Probably anybody who’s heard this piece has heard those quick thirty-second notes—in pink—repeatedly jump out at them.⁵ But when you know to listen for them, the other three are just as distinctive, especially when given characteristic articulations: the smooth scale in purple, its faster counterpart in cyan, and the hop/skip/jump in green. 

This lets Bach get away with a lot. Famously, this fugue is something like an exercise in stretti—in how soon Bach can have a new entrance of the tune come in right after the previous one. Such exercises can be notoriously difficult to actually parse when you hear them. Take the “Credo” from the B-Minor Mass:

“At least this song has words!” you think, until the violins come in and you realize that you are truly dead in the water, that this is a seven-part fugue with stretti and augmentation and you will count yourself lucky just to pick out each of the three gazillion “Cre-” entrances.

This C-major fugue is nothing like that. And it’s the subject that makes all the difference. Instead of the long, even notes of the “Credo” tune, Bach has given us four identifiable motives in quick succession. So, when there’s a traffic jam (er, stretto), each color will still stand out against the others:

(That half-purple note isn’t a mistake; the fugue subject begins midway through the note. You might only pick it up in retrospect, during the pink segment.)

Not only does that make this fugue relatively easy to parse by ear, it makes it a great replay/relisten. Each time through it, you can pay attention to a different color, or to the interplay between different subsets of colors. I could give you a thousand more words on specific examples of such interplay, but I think you now have the tools to do it yourself. There are something like 64 possible combinations of segments and voices, and Bach uses an awful lot of them. Let me know how many you count.

What’s All This Now?

No, it’s not another prank, I’m actually planning to do a sequel series of the Bach “keyboard” works. Let’s go Q&A-style again:

• Seriously?? More Bach?

  • It was a consistent throughline in the survey! I’m just giving the people what they want!

• OK, but what exactly is this? Bach at Bond was a recital series; this is….?

  • This is a much less formal web-only series in which I’ll “go through” the rest of the keyboard pieces on harpsichord.

  • Still, I’d like to include a performance component again, so I’m making recordings for each piece. But this is not a recording project, at least in the sense of making studio products. I’m trying to keep the recordings more or less “live” by doing no more than two full takes per piece, and only editing noise at beginnings and ends.⁶ There will be mistakes; there already are mistakes in the recordings for this week! 

• What order are you going in? Do you have another spreadsheet? 

  • The order will be “whatever I feel like next,” and there is no spreadsheet. Don’t worry, I am not going to start by going through WTC Book I all in a row. 

• Seriously?? More blogging?

  • At a much reduced pace and volume per post! Don’t worry!

• What pace are you planning to work at?

  • As you can see, a lot less than a recital’s worth at a time! I’m roughly planning on doing one BWV number per post, unless it’s something extra-long (Goldberg Variations) or extra-short (things like Little Preludes).

  • Pace of posting: approximately once a month. That projects to about 20 years’ worth, which should be enough time to learn the D-major Toccata.

• What can we expect on Left on Reed?

  • More or less the same as before (the survey was a more or less even split), although (except this week) posts will be much shorter due to the reduced number of pieces. I also don’t plan to have one of these “second sections” for every post (most posts?). 

• Seriously?? More K-pop?

  • Look, the survey doesn’t lie: a lot of people like that section and I have a great time writing it. Good music comes in all shapes and sizes.

• Tell me about the harpsichord you’re using!

  • I’ll hopefully have the chance to give you recordings on a couple instruments, but for now I’m using the nice Flemish double at University of Chicago. I’ll probably write something about the instrument in a future post.

  • The temperament for this week was Barnes; even if Barnes wasn’t correct about his historical evidence, his temperament sounds great! But for other pieces I’ll just use good ‘ol 6th-comma meantone. (And I should do a temperament post at some point.)

• Aren’t you an organist?

  • My degrees are in organ but I do have a lot of experience playing harpsichord (continuo) in ensembles and Baroque opera performances. I’m also currently teaching harpsichord at UW-Madison, if that means anything to you. But yes, this is also definitely a structured way to ensure that I’m polishing and going through solo repertoire.

  • If you’re a harpsichordist and have technique comments, I’m happy to hear them! Just make sure to try to sus out if it’s a competency problem or a performance problem; like I said, I’m aware that the articulation in the Fugue recording above isn’t ideal, you don’t need to tell me.

• Will you update the rest of the site?

  • Yes, I’ll write a new FAQ based on this and archive the old one.

• Are you taking requests?

  • You know what, sure! I can’t guarantee that it’ll be the next month’s post, but if there’s a piece you want to see/hear sooner rather than later, I’m happy to accommodate.

  • But if you want to make more than one request, I might consider making that a paid perk….

What I’m Listening To

Janine Jansen with Klaus Mäkelä and the Oslo Philharmonic – Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No.1

I’ve been missing out. Look, there are only so many hours in the day, and there are a gazillion violinists (even just the ones on major labels) out there going through the bog-standard concerto rep. I first encountered Jansen as the kind of violinist who records the Mendelssohn and Bruch concertos. Excuse me for not making time to listen to her versions.

Who knows why, but I finally made time for this release, and boy am I glad that I did. Jansen is not just any violinist. (That shows up on some of the older disks—the Beethoven+Britten Concertos album is excellent—but not really, as it turns out, on the Mendelssohn+Bruch record.) Her Sibelius manages to beat out even Kulenkampff and Furtwängler’s classic recording as my new favorite. Jansen just gets this music, both playing the hardest passages with real virtuosity and nicely parsing out the rhythmic and phrasing subtleties that Sibelius always makes you grapple with. 

She also makes use of an astonishing range of tone colors. Like many musicians nowadays (across industries), Jansen likes to whisper, to give us a no-vibrato, icy sound. But she knows to use it as a special effect instead of letting it take over the piece. Likewise, she can play with the sumptuous tone and vibrato of a midcentury Jewish expat, but she doesn’t let us get tired of that either. Instead, she gives us death-defying leaps between these two extremes (in the cadenza of the first movement), or uses the massive contrast between them to produce absolutely whiplash-inducing crescendi and decrescendi. Just listen to the opening. Wow. 

(The Prokofiev is played very well, but as usual this piece just makes me wish I were listening to the second concerto instead.)

You probably noticed that this record also stars our soon-to-be CSO head honcho as well. Without wading into the debate about his age or media image yet (I have a rant in me about how his appointment was received, but not today), I’ll just say that this performance exhibits many of his usual traits: very polished and shapely playing from the orchestra, full of nice details, a bit too slow, and never quite inspiring. It’s a brutal contrast to Jansen’s incandescent playing, (although maybe it’s a good backdrop, since it makes her stand out more?). Still, I’ll absolutely take “polish and cohesion.” The recording of this piece that I grew up on was Perlman with Erich Leinsdorf and Boston. And you only need to hear thirty or so seconds of that to appreciate what modern orchestral standards and conducting like Mäkelä’s can do for you. 

Mabe Fratti – Sentir Que No Sabes

I promise it’s not just because I’m a lapsed cellist. OK, so I am, and it’s definitely true that I had a lot of fun listening to all the sounds Mabe Fratti gets out of her instrument. (“Elastica II” and “Kitana” are good starting points.) But I think that’s the fun for everyone. “What is that sound? What is that?” Unlike a lot of musicians who use the label, Fratti really does sound like she’s experimenting with sound.

Still, “cool sounds” and “experimental” by themselves aren’t the kind of thing that bring you from “no-Spotify-bio underground” status to “Rolling Stone feature” notoriety. They might, with the right institutional credentials, get you recorded on Kairos or get you into a PhD program in composition. But Fratti is making waves. What makes this album other than just “experimental”? Why is it so good?

I’d go out on a limb and say that, unlike Fratti’s earlier work, about half of this album works as basically indie rock with cello replacing the guitars. (Sure, it features horns more heavily than rock usually does, but so did Forever Changes.) Tracks like “Pantalla Azul,” “Enfrente,” and “Márgen de índice” in particular share a common basic format, taking a frankly pretty, near-pop melody, and nestling it in a bed of noisy, distorted, dissonant, and otherwise unusual instrumentals. It’s a tactic that at times had me oddly reminded of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, with its sudden bursts of cheesy campfire song amid odd percussion, white noise, and long stretches of pure vamping. Fratti is less sentimental than Jeff Tweedy (certainly less so than the worst of indie rock), and devotes more of her album to the “weird stuff,” but the dashes of sugar on Sentir Que No Sabes still do their job: they pull all of the sonic experimentation in toward a musical center. She sings a lot better than Tweedy too. 

Charli XCX – brat

You can read about this album in like, every publication (we’re only waiting for features in Eater and Nature Geoscience), and I’m not the person you need to be hearing about Charli xcx from. So let me keep it short and try not to give you whatever you can read in GQ or whatever.

(After writing that paragraph, I double-checked. We are not, in fact, waiting for the brat feature in Eater. Also, you can read about brat in GQ twice now. Nature: the ball’s in your court.)

It’s pretty unusual for albums to be “growers” for me. That might say something about my music consumption habits—I typically have a couple dozen hours of new music to get to, so something unexciting is just going to go in the wastebasket—but I also just usually find that my snap judgments are usually confirmed on deeper listening. It works right away or it never does. Charli xcx’s Pop 2 really worked, and it worked immediately. brat didn’t quite work. I thought it was good—just like every outlet from TheGamer.com to El País—but it wasn’t clicking. 

Still: this time, I kept relistening, not least because I love Charli xcx (first show I saw after moving to Chicago!) but also because it sounded like the closest Charli had gotten to Pop 2 since 2017. brat is fearless music. That was the first impression. The lyrics (which, again, you can read about in Elle and Defector. You can read about them in Defector twice, actually.) were also a gas.

Second time through: OK, these beats hit hard—I didn’t go clubbing in June, but I imagine that this music is probably illegal in twenty jurisdictions for fear of how hard it must go on the dancefloor. Club sounds of various kinds have been retaking pop music since 2022 (do you want another post about PinkPantheress’s influence?), but Charli might be here to show the kids how it’s really done. Sure, you can do a Jersey Club beat, but can you make a “club classic?”

Third time through: look, maybe it’s because I didn’t really love “Von dutch,” the lead single? Pop 2 was, among other things, a great pop album, tuneful and catchy and with nice harmonies. Oh, but brat has that too, actually! It’s just like an æspa album:⁷ noisy stuff in the first half, melodic stuff in the second. Not that it’s a clean division—“Girl, so confusing” is both and “Talk talk” from the first half has a great tune—but the hooks really started digging their claws into me sometime around “Rewind.” And once they got a hold on me, the first half started making all kinds of new sense. This album doesn’t live up to Pop 2; it exceeds it.

EVERGLOW – “Colourz”

H1-KEY – “Let It Burn”

H1-KEY finally have a bad song. That’s too harsh—“Let It Burn” is fine, and the instrumentals have a great rhythmic punch—but they set an exceedingly high standard for themselves with songs like “Rose Blossom” and all three tracks on the RUN album. H1-KEY have a lot of vocal talent, great personalities, and very high standards. This album doesn’t meet those standards at all. I’m devastated.

Normally, I would leave it there—or just leave this song off and instead talk about excellent new songs and albums from Chuu, Nayeon, Red Velvet, RIIZE, RM, STAYC, or Sunmi—but, well, I do want H1-KEY to succeed, and I’m happy to highlight their prior excellent work. And I also wanted to do a bit of digging into why exactly this song doesn’t work. I’m about to write a lot of analysis of EVERGLOW’s song—but I don’t want to fall into the trap of only using analysis to explain why I think something is good. It should also be able to tell us why a song isn’t good. I promise (again) to be brief.

Truthfully, the biggest indicator of whether or not a pop song works is just going to be the tune itself, and there aren’t many analytical tools for describing tunes. What I can say is that the verses of “Let it Burn” are unmemorable, since they just kind of wander around the notes E♭, F, and G♭; compare them, for instance, to the well-defined melodic shapes of “SEOUL (Such a Beautiful City)” or the downright catchy (in the verses) leaps of “Run.” The tune in the prechorus is better, although the first half (interspersed with Yel’s raps) sounds like a complete jumble to me. And the chorus is better still—but those weird triplets in the middle sound yet again like something from a completely different song, both melodically unremarkable and rhythmically out of place. Bleh.

All that said, I think the biggest thing that bugs me with “Let It Burn” is the harmony. This song just will not stay in one key, and not in a good way. The second chord we hear is already taking us to the subdominant (A-flat minor), and the phrase then hints toward the mediant (G-flat major) before swerving back home via the dominant of the dominant (F major chord into B-flat major). That’s a lot of terminology, but the point is just to say that’s too many keys for eight measures of pop. It would work in a classical piece, but in a song that’s supposed to be pop-punk? And what is going on in the prechorus? I guess it’s supposed to be heading back to G-flat to prepare for the chorus, but the tune is such a clash with the bass that it sounds almost atonal. (Specifically, it outlines a ii chord over the I in its ii-subV-I-V progression.) Don’t get me wrong, I love a great atonal song for women's voices, but it’s just too jarring to work here.

And I can like a song with lots of vacillation between keys too. EVERGLOW’s criminally neglected “COLOURZ” (Yuehua decided to promote the interesting but way less fun song “ZOMBIE” instead) certainly fits the bill. “COLOURZ” absolutely rules, and a big part of the fun lies in carefully planned harmonic shifts.

Right from the beginning, you can hear “COLOURZ” alternate between major and minor blues: it starts extremely major, but the sax hook that leads into each new sixteen-bar phrase is obviously minor. The song as a whole takes that alternation and makes it structural: major verses, minor prechorus and chorus. Cleverly, the opening of a section (especially in the verses) is often ambiguous, leaving out the telltale third and sixth scale degrees and giving your brain enough time to reset. 

That alternation by itself wouldn’t be enough to make a song interesting (“minor chorus followed by major verse” is like, every ITZY song ever—although I do like a lot of those too). But two of the song’s sections play with major/minor ambiguity in an even more ear-catching and engaging way. Start with the bridge (2:07): like the chorus that precedes it, this section starts out with a pretty basic minor tune, B-D C♯-E-F♯. But the fun begins on the repeat (2:17): each of those bass notes is harmonized with a major triad above it. If you know some music theory, you might recognize that B-D and C♯-E are minor thirds, so that each of these major chords implies a scale that doesn’t include the next note of the tune; your brain has to quickly switch from D♯-land to D♮-land, from E♯-land to E♮-land.⁸ (D♮-land and E♯-land aren’t neighboring countries either.) To cap it off, Mia’s high notes on top (which I didn’t even notice until about 15 listens in) are all in the minor tonic, giving another, direct layer of harmonic clash to the sound. I would probably complain about this section if it were the verses: it wouldn’t work if the song hadn’t prepared us so diligently for all this major-minor business. 

The other section that makes great hay out of the major/minor thing is the prechorus (“Oh-oh…,” first at 0:28), which is easily one of the best prechoruses I’ve ever heard. The fun thing is: this time, the major and minor keys in question are the relative keys (same scale, different tonic, B minor vs D Major), whereas the other sections are playing around with parallel keys (different scales, same tonic, B minor/Major). Relative keys are much easier to slip between (as H1-KEY’s song also demonstrates), since you can make the shift by just changing which notes of the scale you emphasize: in this case, a simple bassline that just slowly goes down the B-minor scale already gets me thinking D major. (It’s almost the exact harmonic turn that the chorus of Bob Marley’s “Could You Be Loved” makes—in the same key/s.) The relative major/minor ambiguity tends to sound poppy and nostalgic, a perfect complement to the hard-hitting blues-based harmonies of the rest of the song. 

If you write out the tune of this prechorus (yes, I really did), you can also see how the melody shifts from emphasizing Bs in the first measure (B minor) to emphasizing As later on (D Major). And you can also see how the tune neatly outlines a D major scale:

You can also get a visual reminder of possibly my favorite thing about this tune: its repetition of that high D in different parts of the beat (offbeat, upbeat, downbeat, syncopated repetition). Nobody will be happy with this comparison, but it’s exactly like the “obsessive” and metrically unpredictable repetitions of specific pitches that characterize the melodic writing of Stravinsky and Josquin des Prez (h/t Jesse Rodin). And combined with the shifting chords underneath, it’s almost like a rhythmically creative way of hammering on that melodic D until it becomes the tonic. It doesn’t hurt that this is the highest note Mia can comfortably belt, giving a real sizzle to the whole affair.⁹

OK, one more thing about this prechorus: listen to the beats! I mean the percussion specifically, although you hopefully noticed those descending scales in the synths, which, by lightly outlining B-minor, play nicely against the section’s tonal trajectory. OK, now listen to the drums. Actually—sorry—first, start the whole song over, and note how the intro is mostly accompanied by handclaps, while the first verse is dominated by a whole bevy of hi-hats, kick drum, snares, and other noises. Then you can hear how all of that cuts out again when the prechorus starts: as the long notes in the bass enter, all of the drums drop out and we’re left with just handclaps again. The drums do come back in, but gradually: first the snare (0:38), then the hi-hats (0:43). All three play rhythms that would be enough to support the texture by themselves, but which complement one another (fill in gaps) when played together. This stuff is just expertly fine-tuned. You probably felt a sense of rushing toward the chorus on first listen; all these details in the production are why. (A smaller-scale version of the same thing happens in the bridge too.)

EVERGLOW have rightly been called derivative of BLACKPINK. Most of that is about concept/branding, but it’s undeniable that songs like “DUN DUN” and “SLAY” have more than a trace of “in your area” in them. And yet I would say that their best songs (“DUN DUN,” “LA DI DA,” “Pirate,” and now “COLOURZ”) absolutely trounce anything BLACKPINK has put out. “COLOURZ” definitely shares a lot of DNA with “As If It’s Your Last”;¹⁰ if the chorus of that song were minor-key, then it would be harmonically almost identical. But where the transitions in BLACKPINK’s song can feel clunky, its chorus in an odd key and followed by a somewhat anticlimactic post-chorus, EVERGLOW’s song nails all the details. As is so often the case in K-pop, some imitations are better than the original article.

Also liked…

Thou – Umbilical

Arooj Aftab – Night Reign

Caoilfhionn Rose – Constellation

Dobet Gnahoré – Zouzou

Magdalena Kožená – Czech Songs

Hiatus Kaiyote – Love Heart Cheat Code

What I’m Reading

Twice, I’ve been on a train, reading¹¹ on my computer, only to be interrupted by a well-meaning White person who wanted to know: “How do you type in Chinese?”¹² Both times, what I ended up saying was something like “you type how it sounds and use an autocorrect menu to pick out the character.” Simple enough; you can tell how recent these exchanges were by the fact that they didn’t have any follow-up questions.

Still, they left me with follow-ups. How did that work before autocorrect? It’s a natural enough question, and it’s led a lot of people to Thomas Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter, the best of several recent broad-audience works on Chinese writing in the 20th century. But that was just (by Mullaney’s own admission) the prequel. Now you can read The Chinese Computer. And you should: it’s a breeze to read (I blew through it on the subway to and from ITZY’s Chicago concert), deeply-researched, conceptually thoughtful, and answering most of the questions you probably have for it.

The title is misleading. The subtitle is better: “A Global History of the Information Age.” This is not a book about computers as people typically think about them; it’s exclusively about I/O, about keyboards and input methods with some material on screens and printers. And a very large proportion of the material is not “Chinese” in the sense of “happening/originating in China [or Taiwan]”: much of the most gripping narrative writing in the book takes place in the U.S., and not even necessarily by Chinese speakers (let alone Chinese people). It would be easy to say that that’s an artifact of Mullaney’s nearest archives (he’s based at Stanford), but he makes a convincing case for the transpacific scope of his story.

The story is also global in another way: Mullaney frames his whole story as being about the shift in typography toward “hypography,” toward the input of arbitrary symbols that only correspond indirectly to your desired output.¹³ This shift is indeed truly global, although it’s surely happening quicker in languages with non-Latin scripts. Autocorrect has definitely led me to start inputting some strange sequences of letters for certain English phrases—not always initialisms—but it’s got nothing on the monstrous strings you put in to type ordinary sentences in Chinese. If you’re a professional typist using wubi 五笔, those strings will have practically no relation to the sounds of the language.

Of course, scripts are already arbitrary symbols in relation to language (itself another set of arbitrary symbols), and Mullaney is good at acknowledging how hypography is just adding another layer in a stack of forms of mediation. There’s a lot more of that kind of thing in The Chinese Typewriter—Derrida and Latour have vanished from the bibliography this time, although Kittler stays in—but the underlying thinking about inscription and its relationship to speech is still there. Honestly, The Chinese Computer is in some ways a great introduction to thinking about writing and media.

There are things I would have liked more of. In some ways, the notion of “Chinese” feels too limited: I think I would have preferred a book about the “CJK Computer,” the hanzi/kanji/hanja 漢字 computer. Repeatedly, Japanese computing comes up as a model that Chinese and Taiwanese engineers would like to emulate: but the problems are awfully similar dealing with kanji and hanzi, so why don’t we just hear about Japanese engineers directly? 

There are also a couple cases where Mullaney just wants to get all of his research out on the page, although they’re pretty easy to skim or skip. In the detailed explanations of how people hacked BIOS and printers in the early days of PCs Mullaney can just get way too far in the weeds. It sometimes feels like he’s having fun, but perhaps the fun is having figured out exactly how BIOS itself works. 

Those are minor blemishes, and they may not even bother you. The Chinese Computer is a great read. Maybe I’ll bring a spare copy the next time I get on a long train ride. 

A few others:

• Smithsonian Magazine – How Coffee Helped the Union Caffeinate Their Way to Victory in the Civil War

• Washington Post – The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names

• Common Edge (Witold Rybczynski) – The Next New Thing

• Hakai – The Owls Who Came From Away

• Asterisk – When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica

• National Geographic – Peru's Quechua rappers have the world taking notice

• Symmetry Magazine – John Bahcall: Godfather of solar neutrinos

Thanks for reading, and see you again soon!

1. Before you ask, I did think about bookending the whole series with the E-flat-major Prelude and Fugue BWV 552.

2. Or like, Woody Guthrie’s entire discography combined.

3. Bill Rothstein’s German meter.

4. By which I mean the prototypical organ fugue, as established by North German composers before Bach. #NotAllOrganFugues

5. Bach “sharpened” the rhythm from an original version in sixteenths, BWV 846a/ii.

6. I way overdid the fadeout on the Prelude this week; sorry that it ends up sounding kind of unnatural.

7. Don’t worry, Charli would doubtless welcome this comparison: Pop 2 includes a feature from K-pop artist Jay Park.

(“Oh, that’s why he likes it.” Hush.)

8. I’m aware that this is not an original trick, and this exact chord progression is probably somewhere in either Debussy or Musorgsky. Then again, I usually don’t complain when pop songs steal from Musorgsky.

9. Yes, it’s Mia again; EVERGLOW are old-fashioned in only having one member who can really sing. Delightfully, they’re so old-fashioned that Mia’s also the best dancer; off the top of my head, the most recent combined main dancer/main vocal I can think of is BIGBANG’s Taeyang, who debuted when Mia was 6 years old. 

For the record, none of this is favoritism; Onda is my bias.

10. Itself, of course, a rejected 2NE1 track.

11. Funny enough, it was Wang Li’s 古代汉语 both times.

12. It’s better than being accosted with a book—“How can you read that?”—to which I’ve only raised my eyebrows. I need to have a snarkier response ready.

13. I was gratified to see him briefly nod to music-score software as another example. Mullaney almost always brings up whatever I wish he would bring up, although perhaps not at the length I would hope for.