Dancing to Captain Beefheart

2007年6月我在读一塞：“我想找到我一个女人，会坚持我的大脚趾，直到我必须去”凯尔·甘的博客. The composer Art Jarvinen had used Don Van Vliet’s composition to illustrate an article which he had written about metametrics.

This aroused my interest because it didn’t strike me that Captain Beefheart was a normal point of reference in the contemporary new classical music or conservatoire world. My feeling was, that in that milieu, Beefheart was more of a footnote than an example. If he was used as an example, wouldn’t he exemplify a particular professor’s or composer’s youthful musical exuberance and folly rather than anything else?

I found another article by Art Jarvinen which concerned Captain Beefheart. In February 2006, also at凯尔·甘的博客，艺术wrote:

“我一直想知道为什么我不能跳舞。我不能跳舞扭腰，
or “I Wanna Make It With You.” But I could not NOT dance to Captain
Beefheart. “Lick My Decals Off Baby” is my disco record. I have to move
当我听到它，双膝在不同的节奏走，一只手臂不
knowing what the other one is doing – until it all comes around after…a
同时 - 或者不“。

这契合了我。我也发现在跳舞Beefheart队长的喜悦，但不能在跳舞等雷竞技ios下载音乐。

I invited Art to elaborate on these issues in an article for this blog, which he was very happy to do.

Dancing to Captain Beefheart

by Arthur Jarvinen
©2007，使用许可

You might be surprised to know just how many composers of my generation (I was born in 1956) are Beefheart fans. It’s not hard to understand, really. I was in high school when Lick My Decals Off, Baby came out. Junior high and early high school. Those are the formative years for many musicians. Maybe not the ones who grew up on classical symphonies and played viola in the school orchestra. Not the precocious ones from musical families who were playing Chopin mazurkas in grade school and had the best piano teachers right from the start. I’m talking about the ones, like me, who grew up with pop music, were self-taught, and in eighth or ninth grade started playing drums or guitar or Farfisa organ in garage bands. If you’re one of those kids, and have the kind of mind and ear and imagination that eventually lead you down the path to composition, you’re going to discover and latch onto the more sophisticated and progressive manifestations of what rock music can be.

You might not yet have much of a clue how the music is made, or the skill to play it yourself. But you’re going to discover artists like King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Yes, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart. You’re not going to turn your back on the Who, the Stones, or Led Zeppelin, because they’re great bands and that’s exciting music. But it’s the likes of Beefheart and Zappa that are really going to get inside your mind and change the way you think about music. And that influence doesn’t go away.

Bang-On-A Can clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn once said to me “It would be weird if Beefheart’s influence wasn’t apparent in your music”.

然而,从我所观察到的差异rence between Beefheart fans who are musicians and composers and those who are not. The non-musicians mostly agree that Trout Mask Replica is by far the greatest Beefheart album ever made, if not the best album ever made, period. No one, Beefheart fan or not, can dispute the record’s importance in the history of rock. But musician/composers like myself will not hesitate to tell you that Decals is by far the better record. Beefheart never got better than that. Decals probably wouldn’t and couldn’t have happened without Trout Mask. But from any way you look at it – the performance, the recording and production, the song selection, the band’s instrumentation, and especially the composition – Lick My Decals Off, Baby far surpasses Trout Mask Replica in my opinion. And that is clearly the concensus among the many composers I know who are Beefheart fans.

So much for composers and influences. What about dancing?

事情的简单的事实是，很少有男乐手跳舞。大多数妇女的事，但男人往往不会。至少，这一直是我的观察，因为我是在小学。而且我不认为它总是因为我们不希望。我们大多数人只是不知道怎么了，难道真的有流行跳舞的感觉。

当我大约十或十二我记得一个朋友of mine saying I really ought to learn to dance, especially if I wanted to get close to girls, which I did. So we went to his place and he put on a bunch of records and showed me some moves. I tried, but it just wasn’t working. I felt awkward and silly. So I concluded that I just can’t dance, and probably couldn’t learn. So me and most of my friends would stand on the sidelines at school dances, just listening to the music and watching the girls we were lusting after dance with each other.

But then Lick My Decals Off Baby came out. That was 1971, but I don’t think I got it right away. Spotlight Kid came out after Decals, and a friend of mine already had Spotlight. He was way into that record, so he ordered Decals from his record club. But he hated Decals, just couldn’t get into it AT ALL, so he gave it to me. It was my “Damascus Road”, if you will, my Enlightenment. Decals instantly became my favorite record, and it still is. My “desert island with only one record” record. And one of the things I discovered with Decals was that I actually can dance, if it’s music that “moves me”, as it were.

I have a way of explaining this for myself. It might not stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it’s an interesting model to think about.

在音乐的音响效果有一个叫做“差色调”的现象。每个节距具有频率，周期每秒它振动的数量。当任何两个节距播放一起三分之一节距产生这在其他两个频率之间的差进行振动。这就是区别基调。

Difference tones are weird. You don’t usually hear them, but under certain conditions you can. In fact, they don’t really exist, which is to say they’re not actually producing sound waves in the air. They are illusions manufactured in your inner ear. Your brain does the math.

Church organists have a neat trick. They will sometimes play the lowest note on the pedal board, C, and the G above that. That produces a C an octave below the lowest pedal. By exploiting difference tones they can make you hear a note that isn’t even on the organ! Personally, I think that is very cool, like the fact that the stars we see now disappeared eons ago, and the light is just getting to us now.

在许多关于舔我的贴纸关的曲调，宝贝Beefheart设置不同的模式，不同长度的节奏周期，在不同的节奏打舔。约翰法语（Drumbo）已经谈了很多关于他的方法来构建他的鼓部分。他试图用他的四肢，以加强尽可能多的其他部分，因为他可以。你可以在鳟鱼面具听到这个。但在贴花，你也有艺术特里普（编辑马林巴）演奏鼓。因此，有节奏的纹理，不同的模式和节奏的层次感，要复杂得多。

I think it’s possible that those overlapping rhythms behave like pitches, their combinations and interaction producing what we might call “difference rhythms”, different pulses in the brain. My body picks up on those things in the brain, and I find myself moving in complex ways, not just moving my whole body to one beat or tempo, but different limbs going almost independently, trying to account for and respond to everything that is being generated in the music.

就像我说的，这是我多么想它。这可能是无效的，从任何科学的角度来看，
但谁在乎？我没想到我会跳舞，但贴花让我感动，永远不会。而且感觉不错。

Probably wouldn’t impress girls much, but I’m way past needing to do that anymore.

亚瑟Jarvinen是总部设在洛杉矶的一位作曲家/音乐家，目前在加州艺术学院组成的教师。
www.arthurjarvinen.com