{"id":25149,"date":"2022-02-19T16:41:07","date_gmt":"2022-02-19T21:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=25149"},"modified":"2022-11-28T13:47:26","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T18:47:26","slug":"hidden-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/hidden-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden Place"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Bj\u00f6rk&#8217;s exquisite album <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vespertine\"><em>Vespertine<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/54LQ_AO1gDI?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>I love Bj\u00f6rk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make conventional ideas sound strange. &#8220;Hidden Place&#8221; is a perfect example. Is it a pop song? An art song? A dance groove? A work of experimental ambient music? The answer is, yes, all of the above. The basic structure is pop boilerplate: verse-prechorus-chorus form, a looped bassline and ostinato-based groove organized into four or eight bar phrases. But on top of that standard foundation is a lot of weird stuff. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I would have guessed that the harmony and melody are based on some exotic scale, but no, the whole tune is in regular old D <a href=\"https:\/\/ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/dorian-mode\/\">Dorian mode<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/apps.musedlab.org\/aqwertyon\/theory\/D-4-dorian\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" data-attachment-id=\"24653\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2021\/morning-dew\/d-dorian-mode-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?fit=700%2C700&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"700,700\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"D Dorian mode\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?fit=640%2C640&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-24653\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?resize=640%2C640&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"640\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?w=700&amp;ssl=1 700w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?resize=300%2C300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/D-Dorian-mode.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is the same seven pitches as Bj\u00f6rk uses for &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/the-anchor-song\/\">The Anchor Song<\/a>.&#8221; These two songs could not sound more different from each other, but I guess they do share an unresolved and angular quality.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s my transcription:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.noteflight.com\/embed\/ebb7fe607f0bb51366e4ab5bea47194ba1505980?scale=1&amp;displayMode=strip\" width=\"800\" height=\"480\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.noteflight.com\/scores\/view\/b2e6ac6e77d0f088f118d6c44a09115c9276093c\">I made a guitar tab version too<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The drum part is extraordinarily intricate in its layering. It mostly consists of non-standard drum sounds. There is a regular kick drum, but that&#8217;s reversed a third of the time. Otherwise, the drums sound like they&#8217;re heavily processed found sound or synthesizer blips. To write this beat out in Noteflight, I had to map everything to the components of the standard drum kit, and I know it sounds silly. For example, I mapped the quiet rattling sound to the ride cymbal, and the metallic squink to the high tom. I tried to at least get the relative pitches right.<\/p>\n<p>I have no idea what instrument is playing the main loop. Maybe it&#8217;s heavily processed strings? Whatever it is, the mysterious timbre matches the mysterious melodic figure that it&#8217;s playing. The first half of the loop use the notes B, A, and F. It is totally unclear what harmony might be implied here. If B is the tonic, then A is b7^ and F is b5^. If A is the tonic, then B is 2^ and F is b6^. If F is the tonic, then B is b5^ and A is 3^. None of these are stable sonorities. The second half of the loop uses these same notes, along with a brief jump up to E. That doesn&#8217;t clarify anything. I guess it all implies Fmaj7(#11)?<\/p>\n<p>The vocal melody in the verse gives no further clues as to where the tonic is. The first phrase (&#8220;Through the warmthest cord of care&#8221;) is a pair of major seconds a minor third apart: E and D, then B and A. The rhythmic pattern is a simple short-short-short-long, short-short-short-long, but the notes fall on strange subdivisions of the bar. The next phrase (&#8220;your love was sent to me&#8221;) walks up the scale from A to E in a broken rhythm, then falls back down to B and concludes by stepping up to C. So, maybe this implies A natural minor? Or C major? The next two phrases mirror the pitch structure of the first two, and the rhythms continue to be mostly unpredictable.<\/p>\n<p>In the prechorus, the vocal melody does finally start revolving around D as its central pitch. However, the line &#8220;calling you up&#8221; lands emphatically on B, playing up Dorian&#8217;s similarity to the <a href=\"https:\/\/ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/the-diminished-scale\/\">diminished scale<\/a>. The choir destabilizes D&#8217;s centrality by mostly repeating E and A. In the chorus, the bass enters and finally puts a harmonic floor underneath everything, playing a somewhat conventional electronic dance music bassline in D Dorian. But now the first half of the vocal melody seems to center around G, and the second half centers around A. The chorus melody carefully avoids the notes F and C, the color tones. The choir sings a lovely arpeggio that sounds to me like G7sus4 resolving to G7, yet another facet you get from turning the jewel of D Dorian mode. (Update: a guy on Twitter informs me that this arpeggio is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.whosampled.com\/sample\/23132\/Bj%C3%B6rk-Hidden-Place-Arnold-Schoenberg-Transfigured-Night,-Op.4\/\">a quote from Arnold Schoenberg&#8217;s Transfigured Night<\/a>. Live and learn.)<\/p>\n<p>After the chorus, there&#8217;s a break, which the choir fills with an eerily skeletal B\u00f87 chord, just B, D, and A. The chord sustains for three entire measures, which makes me think that it&#8217;s sampled, but maybe the choir just sang it; it&#8217;s impossible to tell through all the reverb. There&#8217;s a male choir (or the same female choir pitched down) muttering obscurely underneath. And then the break ends with a descending chromatic figure on an ethereal bamboo flute that you never hear again for the rest of the album. Amazing.<\/p>\n<p>A French fan site has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bjork.fr\/the-production-of-vespertine\">a note from Bj\u00f6rk about the production of <em>Vespertine<\/em><\/a> &#8211; all idiosyncratic spelling and capitalization is hers:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>i guess the first stage is i decided what the instrumentation was going to be ,<\/p>\n<p>then i did about 80% of the beats with the help of programmers ( which means you bring noises or describe what kind of noises you want and then place them maticulously , sound by sound , in the places you want them to be in .) song structure decisions .<\/p>\n<p>then i did the harp arrangements that zeena played adding her own arrangements in the songs where it is credited<\/p>\n<p>then i did scetches of string arrangements that vince mendoza completed some and then orchestrated .<\/p>\n<p>then i asked people like marius de vries and matthew herbert and matmos to add stuff after i had descibed to them what i was after .<\/p>\n<p>the last stage is mixing , then you have perhaps up to 80 channels of stuff and the work of a producer is to pick what ends up in the song and what not .<\/p>\n<p>on vespertine a lot off stuff was thown out . roughly i would guess about 60% .<\/p>\n<p>i tried to be as brief as possible<\/p>\n<p>i hope that answers your question<\/p>\n<p>warmth<\/p>\n<p>bj\u00f6rk<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.factmag.com\/2017\/11\/24\/bjork-technology-instruments-software\/\">In an interview<\/a>, Bj\u00f6rk describes writing everything out in Sibelius, including the beats. So maybe my Noteflight drums aren&#8217;t as far away from her conception as I thought.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a live version, featuring the great <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zeena_Parkins\">Zeena Parkins<\/a> on harp. Check out the guy from <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Matmos\">Matmos<\/a> shuffling cards for percussion!<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gPRwItqMJJU?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>Matmos also did this fairly wonderful remix:<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-mUkFZZwYyg?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>There is some controversy among listeners about &#8220;Fun Bj\u00f6rk&#8221; vs &#8220;Art Bj\u00f6rk&#8221;. The manic pixie dream girl who recorded &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/216125945\">It&#8217;s Oh So Quiet<\/a>&#8221; is not much in evidence on <em>Vespertine,<\/em> or on any of her subsequent albums, really. Some people are mad about that. I don&#8217;t know. I was drawn in by Fun Bj\u00f6rk too, but Art Bj\u00f6rk is the person who has put out most of the music, and while I haven&#8217;t found all of that music to be easy listening, it rewards all the attention I am able to give it.<\/p>\n<p>Update: <a href=\"https:\/\/wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com\/2022\/02\/ethan-hein-discusses-hidden-place-by.html\">Don&#8217;t miss the response post by Wenatchee<\/a>. Good quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[I]n the hands of capable composers, songwriters and musicians the floating symmetricality of dorian can let you either groove ad infinitum as though you&#8217;ve left earth as we know it or show that you&#8217;ve got control of a scale that predates the major and minor key systems by centuries and that you know how to write melodies with it that exploit its ambience.\u00a0 You can write a song full of harmonies that, as many Renaissance era composers demonstrated, were written with overlapping melodic lines in a shared mode that had plenty of harmony but it was not chordal harmony, not chordal harmony as we would be taught it in theory courses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The simultaneous modern-ness and ancientness of Dorian is a big part of the appeal for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Bj\u00f6rk&#8217;s exquisite album Vespertine: I love Bj\u00f6rk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2022\/hidden-place\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Hidden Place&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[909,924,9],"tags":[89,1567,1882,225,2522,1559,1211,2523],"class_list":["post-25149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-composition","category-key-musicians","category-music","tag-bjork","tag-composition","tag-dorian-mode","tag-electronica","tag-matmos","tag-music-theory","tag-schoenberg","tag-zeena-parkins","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pAPdE-6xD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25149"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26751,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25149\/revisions\/26751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}