String Theory Media

Songs in the key of life

STM was named after a musical/scientific metaphor that tries to describe the deep structure of the cosmos. Now here's a fascinating exercise in trying to use music as a way to better comprehend and communicate the deep structure of life. The Gene2Music project created a translation algorythm that interprets sequences of amino acids in DNA as chords. A Discover Channel article explains the motivation HERE. And HERE's the home of the Gene2Music project, which includes a wonderful summary page with links to other creative fusions of science and music.

Sojourn in Sebastopol

I haven’t posted in way too long. My excuse is that I took a nice road trip with my wife Taylor who was reporting a travel story about sustainable farms in Sonoma County CA. It made for a blissful working vacation, which as usual required a pile of work on the front and back end, thus the silence.

The only musical hook of the trip was a visit to Sebastopol, a city that shares a title with a song from the repertoire of my home-area heroine Elizabeth Cotten. I had to look up the connection. The California wine country town was named after Sevastopol, Russia, a city taken by siege in the Crimean War, of all things. An Englishman named Henry Worrall wrote a sort of military march commemorating the battle for guitar that became one of the parlor hits of the 19th century. The open tuning he used would come to be called 'Vastopol tuning.

Libba Cotten was fond of marches (she played a fabulous version of the University of North Carolina graduation song arranged from her memories of listening to the annual ceremony through the football stadium gates with other black children from Chapel Hill in the very early 1900s) and her style had as much parlor in it as it did back porch. Now I say this with no definitive proof that she’s playing exactly the same version as Mr. Worrall’s sheet music, having never heard or seen that early song. But Cotten's version was model enough for folk genius John Fahey. He recorded the song (formally titled “The Seige of Sevastopol”) on his 1964 album “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites.” How’s that for a cheery title? I actually thought I might own that album, but when I went to the shelf, it turned out that the one LP I own is actually “Blind Joe Death,” which says something about the late great Mr. Fahey’s preoccupations.

One final cool coincidence. On my CD shelf, right next to John Fahey’s slot is Jay Farrar of Son Volt, with a solo album called “Sebastopol.”

We Love Revver

YouTube may be ubiquitous but the video quality is ridiculous. Herewith, String Theory Media endorses Revver. It's small and growing but it looks and sounds just a whole lot better. Here's last week's upload - our pals in the Infamous Stringdusters performing at radio station KSUT in Colorado. You can do an A/B comparison on the YouTube hosted version below. What do you think?

Losing Control and Liking It

Following the jump is my editorial in this week's CMA.EDU, a biweekly roundup of digital music news I co-edit with David Ross of Music Row for the CMA Future Markets Task Force. It describes two visions of the music business laid out by twin keynote speakers at last week's Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville. No surprise that I'm more inclined to be with Terry McBride, whose mantra was "give up control" of recorded music. He urges artists to create other events and products and relationships that can be monetized, including CD and download sales, but don't sweat it when people want to share your music. Then today I saw this piece by Peter Gabriel about how he changed his mind after resisting the sharing/no control paradigm for years. I admit it's easy for me to embrace the DRM-free, sharing-is-good philosophy, as I'm not a working musician or a songwriter. It's got to be hard to charge down this path of uncertainty when it seems like everyone from music supervisors to Debbie in her dormroom wants your music from nothing. But more and more artists are relenting to what may be the inevitable.