[00:00:00] Mahea: An energetically scholastic throwback theme, a captivating piece of experimental sound art, and an alt rock ode to one of civilization's most celebrated minds. You're listening to Themes and Variation. Themes and Variation is a podcast about music and perspectives brought to you by Soundfly. I'm your host, Mahea Lee.
[00:00:35] Well, hello. I hope you've got your beakers and Bunsen burners ready to go, because today we're talking about "Songs About Science." I'm gonna be candid with you, I wasn't all that crazy about this theme at first. Science was always a bit of a struggle for me back in school, and since there's kind of an academic angle to this podcast, it initially stirred up some scholastic panic.
[00:00:58] I eventually remembered that science is pretty great when I'm not getting graded on it, and then I surprised myself with the song I picked. So be sure to stay tuned for the third... tune.
[00:01:09] Anyway, in addition to yours truly, this episode's panel includes show favorites Martin Fowler and Jeremy Young, each of whom brought in an excellent selection that I really enjoyed talking about.
[00:01:20] As always, if you like what you hear and want to help us keep this thing going, please subscribe to Themes and Variation on the podcast platform, or, hey, platforms, of your choice, and leave us a positive review.
[00:01:33] And with that, I present the episode, "Songs About Science."
[00:01:41] Hey everyone, welcome back to Themes and Variation. I'm your host, Mahea Lee, and I'm here today with my good friends, Jeremy Young and Martin Fowler, to talk about "Songs About Science." Jeremy, you picked this one. Where did the inspiration come from?
[00:01:57] Jeremy: I have no idea. It just jumped out at me. For the listener out there, we have a spreadsheet of like 400 topics, probably more than that, if I'm being honest. And when you scroll down, it can get really blurry really fast, and then this one just... mabye it was in capital letters, I don't know, but it just jumped out and I was like, "that's so interesting."
[00:02:17] But then of course it kickstarted a three day anxiety fest for me where I was like, "Oh crap, now I need to choose a song. Ah!" What about you guys?
[00:02:25] Mahea: Yeah, there's way more songs about science than I expected... is mostly my big takeaway. Like I thought this was going to be really hard and then I got to thinking and I was like, well, not to like be that person, but isn't everything about science? Therefore all music is about science? You know what I'm saying?
[00:02:42] Jeremy: If this is, if this is a preview for the kinds of conversations we're about to have, this might be a dangerous one.
[00:02:50] Martin: This was a hard one for me. It did not bring a lot to mind immediately. I had a couple of thoughts. One was like... I was thinking about like what songs are in the science sphere or related to science.
[00:03:03] The music of Radiolab came to mind, 'cause Radiolab is so science focused. But other than that, the only thing that came to my mind was the thing I ended up picking, which is why I picked it.
[00:03:14] Mahea: I really thought I was going to pick something Andrew Bird. Because he'll just randomly drop in, like, terminology from the world of science, but then I'll look closer at the lyrics and be like, this song really isn't. About something that you'd learn about in science class or anything. It's like a metaphor for a moment.
[00:03:38] Track: [music]
[00:03:40] Mahea: They Might Be Giants have an entire kids' album called Here Comes Science.
[00:03:58] Track: [music]
[00:03:59] Martin: I forgot about that.
[00:04:00] Jeremy: Yeah, there was definitely a part of me that was like, I wonder if I can get some sort of cool artist that has done like a Sesame Street song about science, you know, and like kind of break that down.
[00:04:10] Mahea: This was a weird one because I feel like there's two ways to go, right? Like there's the kids songs like we're talking about, or you could go super highbrow... like Holst came to mind, stuff like that, which was a little on the nose, but maybe more than my brain wanted.
[00:04:21] Martin: Holst totally did come to mind as well. Planets.
[00:04:30] Track: [music]
[00:04:31] Jeremy: I was gonna choose Joanna Newsom's track, uh, called "Emily." I think it's about her sister. I can't remember, but it's basically like this conversation that they had about how to like, memorize the difference between like a meteorite and a comet and asteroids and stuff like that.
[00:04:53] Track: [music]
[00:04:56] Jeremy: The first thing that came to my mind when I started thinking about this topic, for some reason, was the Beastie Boys because in their music videos, they always like dress up in like lab coats and different like get ups and stuff like that.
[00:05:07] And the video for "Intergalactic" was shot in Tokyo. And you know, they're like battling this like giant robot thing. And I was like, I know that they always dress up like different characters and they've, you know, done scientists. I wonder if their lyrics kind of like go into that stuff, but of course they don't really.
[00:05:27] Track: [music]
[00:05:30] Jeremy: But I thought about Coldplay's "The Scientist."
[00:05:34] Track: [music]
[00:05:35] Jeremy: Old Coldplay just fricking rules. And it was great to revisit that song, but lyrically, I don't know what he's talking about. It has nothing to do with science or anything. It's just like, it's kind of a love song. I don't know.
[00:05:52] The big one that I really considered for a while was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Higgs Boson Blues."
[00:05:58] Mahea: Oh.
[00:05:58] Jeremy: 'Cause I just wanted an excuse to talk about the Higgs boson, but, um...
[00:06:01] Mahea: I mean, you can, we won't stop you.
[00:06:07] Track: [music]
[00:06:09] Jeremy: I really like that song. Again, it's not really about that. I mean, it is and it isn't. I don't know. It's like a metaphor. I think it's a creative jumping off point.
[00:06:16] Mahea: Totally.
[00:06:17] I actually have one question for you guys that's semi unrelated before we jump in. So science as a subject... that was my worst subject in school by far. I did the chemistry and the physics and the biology.... I'm saying this like I'm 65 years old... it was always the struggle for me. How were you with science?
[00:06:34] Martin: I loved science. I went to space camp.
[00:06:36] Mahea: I remember! We bonded over that. We have that in common.
[00:06:39] Martin: I think I've mentioned that on the pod before It's sort of surprising to me.
[00:06:43] Honestly that I didn't go into some kind of STEM career. I guess music is kind of mathy
[00:06:49] Jeremy: Especially yours.
[00:06:51] Mahea: Exactly. You kind of went into the science of music.
[00:06:54] Martin: Fair enough. Fair enough.
[00:07:03] Track: [music]
[00:07:03] Mahea: Engineering and mixing... Um, Jeremy, how was science for you in school?
[00:07:08] Jeremy: Well, there's a, there's a little caveat here. So. I actually didn't do very well in science in school, but I was always really interested in it. And I was so interested that I joined a club that was going to be like a young... oh God, I don't remember what it was called, but it was something like young scientists look for evidence of water on Mars or something like that.
[00:07:27] Like this is sort of like in the late nineties and we would basically trawl through whatever research there was coming out like every single day in science journals and then try to do our own lab experiments to see like probabilities and stuff of uh, ice bound water existing on, on the planet Mars.
[00:07:45] And I joined this group, but then I got kicked out of the group because I had the worst grades in my science classes. And so they were like, "look, you're getting really good grades in English and literature and just stick to that."
[00:07:55] Mahea: Oh no. And the world was changed forever.
[00:07:58] Jeremy: But a late life, uh, anecdote was that, I don't know if you guys know this, I'm pretty sure you don't, 'cause not a lot of people do, but I currently release music under my own name ...well, I'm not really releasing too much music these days anyway, but when I do it's under my own name.
[00:08:13] But before, I was really nervous about using my name so I actually adopted a solo moniker, uh, which was Szilard. Which was like a tribute to Leo Szilard, who is the Hungarian American Jewish physicist that was part of the Manhattan Project.
[00:08:28] Martin: Whoa.
[00:08:29] Mahea: This is why you picked this theme. It's near and dear to your heart.
[00:08:32] Jeremy: This is all coming back to me now, guys. One of the things with Szilard, though, is that he was like one of the naysaying voices in the Manhattan Project who helped draft the petition that Einstein signed, um, not to drop the bomb. And he ended up winning the Atoms for Peace Award.
[00:08:48] So I was really into that kind of like pacifist mindset when it comes to, you know, art, creativity, science, like sort of making the world a better place through this idea of exploration and experimentation.
[00:08:59] Martin: Yeah. That's a cool, cool history.
[00:09:01] Also, I just want to be really clear. I did very bad in high school from an academic perspective. I had like a 2.8 in high school. It was real bad. But I just didn't care about the way that they were presenting the information, you know? As an ADHD kid, it was tough.
[00:09:14] Jeremy: Boo standardized testing.
[00:09:16] Martin: It was tough to learn in that environment. So I'm with you. I'm with you.
[00:09:19] Mahea: Well, we won't relive my glory days with standardized testing or anything like that. We're just going to go ahead and...
[00:09:25] Jeremy: Wait, is that just a coy way of saying that you did really, really well in school, Mahea?
[00:09:29] Mahea: I mean, this is just conversation now, but I have inattentive ADHD and didn't know it. So I test a lot better than I perform.
[00:09:36] Martin: Yeah.
[00:09:36] Mahea: So I look like I should be like the smartest kid in the class. In reality, you're not going to get that from me like ever. But, uh, yeah.
[00:09:44] Jeremy: It all makes so much sense now.
[00:09:46] Mahea: And all of a sudden it all clicks into place. On the topic of standardized testing, let's go ahead and jump into Marty's song right now.
[00:09:57] Track: [music]
[00:10:01] Mahea: Martin Fowler, talk to us about the sweet perfection that is your song selection.
[00:10:20] Martin: Yeah! Um, Magic School Bus. What a, what a gem.
[00:10:25] Honestly, I hadn't even thought about this show existing in the world until you said the words, "songs about science." And I was like, "there's a perfect one."
[00:10:35] Technically the song itself Isn't about science.
[00:10:40] Mahea: They mentioned some scientific-y things. They say "surfing on a sound wave." What's more scientific than that?
[00:10:47] Martin: So this is a wonderful song from a wonderful show of what I think of as the golden age of TV...
[00:10:53] Jeremy: Agreed.
[00:10:54] Martin: ...for kids, which is of course, because I was a kid when this was on TV. So that's how I feel about it. It's just such a beautiful cross section of culture over time that I feel like was reaching for the best of all of us.
[00:11:08] And I think back very, very fondly of this show, which was on TV from 1994 to 1997, and then had a little revamp.
[00:11:17] Mahea: That's it?!
[00:11:17] Jeremy: Yeah, wow.
[00:11:18] Martin: I was shocked to learn that... just a few short seasons, well, decently long seasons, but not a lot of time.
[00:11:25] It got a little reboot in the late 2010s, which I'll get back to in a minute, but the theme song is by, uh, Peter "Lurye" or "Luray." I'm actually not sure exactly what the pronunciation is, but let's go with "Luray." He's someone who's done, who kind of like fell into the kids shows and kids theme songs kind of career trajectory by accident. He hadn't really written a ton of songs until he got the tap.
[00:11:53] But he's a classically trained musician. He trained to be a conductor and then as an orchestrator, he has like a deep classical background. And then, um, he knew someone who tapped him to write the music for Eureka's Castle.
[00:12:04] Jeremy: Woah!
[00:12:16] Track: [music]
[00:12:16] Martin: Some other stuff he's worked on includes Dora the Explorer, Gulla Gulla Island, Bear in the Big Blue House... That was a big one for him. That took him pretty far post Magic School Bus, so...
[00:12:29] Jeremy: That trajectory reminds me, through Soundfly earlier this year, we did this chat with Pat Irwin who now is in this band called SUSS, but he got together with a bunch of musicians on the Lower East Side Like in the nineties and ended up doing the theme song for Rocko's Modern Life.
[00:12:45] And then he did a couple more cues for Rocko's Modern Life. And then all of a sudden, like the next, like 30 years, he was getting calls from Hollywood and TV, like to do theme songs and different crazy stuff.
[00:12:54] So it's basically like one like sort of small, weird, probably low budget hit can kind of just like launch the trajectory of a career in that world now.
[00:13:03] Mahea: Wait, but he was also in the B-52's, right?
[00:13:06] Jeremy: The B-52's! That's the band. That's the band. Yeah.
[00:13:07] Mahea: I feel like that is the kind of band where you'd be like, "this person can probably write kids music." Kind of like They Might Be Giants or something like that. There's something about it where you're like... Rock Lobster, Rocko's Modern Life.
[00:13:17] Anyway, Marty, so talk to us more about Miss Frizzle and the gang.
[00:13:20] Martin: So Miss Frizzle and the Gang, such a cool show, all about science, but presented in a fun sort of, uh, magical realism kind of format. I have distinct memories of being like, "oh my god, that's what the inside of my body is supposed to look like."
[00:13:34] Mahea: Yeah, that episode.
[00:13:36] Martin: It's just, that was never presented to me in any other format before that.
[00:13:41] Let's see, some interesting musical stuff about this song. Number one, the vocalist. Anybody know the vocalist?
[00:13:48] Mahea: I just looked it up, but let's say no. Who is it?
[00:13:51] Martin: The one, the only, Little Richard. Oh yeah. Just sounds amazing on this track. Incredible on this track.
[00:14:07] Track: [music]
[00:14:07] Martin: In the late 2010s, with the remake, they also remade the theme song featuring... Instead of Little Richard...
[00:14:15] Mahea: Big Richard.
[00:14:17] Martin: Lin Manuel Miranda.
[00:14:19] Mahea: Oh, that makes sense.
[00:14:21] Jeremy: Yeah, that makes too much sense.
[00:14:22] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:14:23] Martin: When I first saw that I was like, wait, did he write it? Could he have done that? No, he did not write it. But, he was a great fit for the revamp. And actually he, uh, he voiced one of the characters in the revamp as well.
[00:14:40] Track: [music]
[00:14:46] Martin: Let's talk about the actual music of the song. It's a fun little ditty. It really is. It has some really weird sort of moments with time in particular.
[00:14:56] I couldn't quite find any information about whether or not the animations were cut to the music or vice versa. It seems like they had some episodes created, they lifted some of that content for the opening sequence, and then the theme song got cut to that... or written to that rather.
[00:15:14] So, there's a round first four bars before we really get into the verse, but it doesn't sound like it because there's sort of one bar of intro, four beats of intro, and then a two beat segment before the chord changes, which is really interesting. It's like a five-one.
[00:15:35] Track: [music]
[00:15:35] Martin: So if you listen really carefully, there's a little bit of like mouth vocal percussion happening in the background and little claps and stuff. Here's one more time.
[00:15:44] Track: [music]
[00:15:49] Martin: It's got the classic orchestra hit sample in there. And you hear it doing sort of a 5, 1, and it sounds like that's where the beat starts. But if you count from the very, very beginning of where the vocal percussion is, it's a full 16 quarter notes, 4 bars of four-four, with this weird like 6 beat intro. I'm going to play it one more time.
[00:16:08] Mahea: Please do.
[00:16:09] Track: [music and counting]
[00:16:19] Martin: It's such funny writing like... Why is it like that?
[00:16:22] Jeremy: Well, it's theatrical, right? That's like how theater cues work. It's like...
[00:16:25] Martin: Yeah.
[00:16:26] Jeremy: There's something visual or something sonic that happens or an object that kind of makes itself present. And that sets off like a time and then, you know, everybody locks into that time and that tempo and yeah, it's interesting.
[00:16:39] Mahea: The bus horn. Does it relate to the harmony of the song? Is it an F above middle C, like a car horn, like the AAMCO..?
[00:16:47] Jeremy: Double A, uh, uh.
[00:16:48] Mahea: Yeah. Do we know? Is it related to the song at all?
[00:16:51] Martin: It is a little bit related. I mean, to my ear, it's an F sharp, which is the nine, because it's in the key of E, which is a nice neutral kind of relationship to the key center.
[00:17:00] Obviously it's very rhythmic too. It has a direct rhythmic relationship to everything else that's going on. From there, it, it goes through... it's not a blues form, but it's definitely blues form adjacent and blues informed. You're spending a lot of time on a one chord with sort of a blues tonality, borderline mixolydian tonality.
[00:17:23] Like a lot of stuff we've talked about internally of late, like the Rage Against the Machine thing, where it's like, there's a lot of different tonalities informing what's going on, but it's ultimately a blues tonality. Where the minor and the major third are both important.
[00:17:36] So, you know, in terms of the chords, you'd call it a I chord, a major chord, or a I7. And then it goes up to the IV chord, and it spends a little time there. Back to the I, and then it goes IV and then V.
[00:17:49] And then it has a wonderful moment where it moves up to the bVI, which is a blues minor thing. And you think it's gonna go like, "Dun dun, bum bum, bum bum," back to the five and then to the one.
[00:18:02] But instead it goes, "dun dun, flat six," and then that becomes the five to the one, and it modulates up to F.
[00:18:09] Mahea: Yeah, that modulation, man.
[00:18:14] Track: [music]
[00:18:15] Martin: Just a really smart, clean modulation that I adore in a song that is like, what, a minute and a half?
[00:18:23] Mahea: Less than that.
[00:18:24] Martin: A solid minute.
[00:18:25] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:18:25] Martin: A solid 60. That's so cool.
[00:18:28] Mahea: I mean, to Jeremy's point, that is like a classic musical theater style modulation, too. Totally. Like, it's very theatrical to just be like, "...and now we're up."
[00:18:36] Jeremy: There's something, too, about, like, the metaphor of the school bus, right? Like, it takes you away from home to a place where you're going to be like learning new things and going on a journey and then it inevitably brings you back home, right?
[00:18:48] So it's sort of like a school bus and the 12 bar blues or just any kind of a blues... I mean, it's totally right in that wheelhouse. Like the music and the sonics need to respect the animation and what the school bus represents for children and their parents... this, like, safe place to explore and then come back home, you know?
[00:19:06] I would love to, at some point, look at the music of that, um, Studio Ghibli film. Uh, I think it's Totoro or whatever.
[00:19:13] Mahea: I love Totoro.
[00:19:14] Jeremy: With the, uh, with the cat bus.
[00:19:16] Martin: I bet there's a related homeward bound element to it musically as well. Um, speaking of taking us home, let's listen to the end.
[00:19:25] Track: [music]
[00:19:28] Mahea: That's so musical theater.
[00:19:30] Martin: It's so musical theater. And one thing I particularly love about it is there's no qualms about where we're landing. We are landing at home with that. There's the main melody, "Da da da da da ba ba ba." And then the harmony above it is all, it's all major thirds.
[00:19:45] So you land on this big, fat major chord with the major third on the top. And it's just like, we are home now. No question about it.
[00:19:52] The real hook of the whole theme is what happens immediately after that, which is this...
[00:19:59] Track: [music]
[00:20:00] Martin: ...which ties back to the very beginning. The horn goes down a half step to match the earlier modulation up a half step. So now the horn is also coming back home and is now on F instead of F sharp.
[00:20:14] And it plays that little burner, burner, which is the real, like, the consistent hook throughout the show.
[00:20:20] Track: [music]
[00:20:21] Mahea: The wheels on the bus go... Are you ready, Jeremy?
[00:20:26] Jeremy: Let's do it.
[00:20:33] Track: [music]
[00:20:40] Mahea: Jeremy Young, what are we listening to?
[00:20:44] Jeremy: Well, let me just say that I'm going with a particular definition of quote unquote "science."
[00:20:49] Mahea: Go on.
[00:20:50] Jeremy: I think the definition that I'm adopting, in a way, opens up to all kinds of like musical output that could be considered like striving for the same kind of like progress and knowledge seeking that like actual scientists might identify with.
[00:21:07] And that's this idea of like seeking new frontiers of knowledge by way of like testing what we know against what we think might work. Right?
[00:21:16] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:21:16] Jeremy: Like that's... that's sort of like the fundamental sort of... science act. I would even extend that definition to include like making use of like elements in the physical world as like sites or, I don't know, receptors of these tests or something.
[00:21:30] So anyway, therefore, um, we have Tristan Perich's incredibly important work of both traditional composition and counterpoint and sound art, his "1-Bit Symphony."
[00:21:43] The whole thing with this was that it was composed and designed for the exact mechanism that it was released on.
[00:21:50] It was a commercial music product, but it was released in a CD jewel case. But it just wasn't a CD. He actually built these tiny playable circuit boards with these microprocessors by hand that were mounted into the back of a CD jewel case and the audio was played back and there was like a headphone jack at the end of the jewel case that you could literally just stick a headphone into and that's how you played back the audio.
[00:22:17] And so there was a little on switch. And then there was a button that the user... like you basically opened a CD case and this circuit was in it. If anyone is interested, you got to look this up.
[00:22:27] But the thing is, it was also basically composed on the same microprocessing computational circuit. So this is literally a piece that's written in ones and zeros onto microprocessors.
[00:22:39] And then those very microprocessors are available to the consumer as the audio product. It's, it's, it's incredible. Like it's just mind boggling.
[00:22:48] Mahea: I can't wrap my brain around so much of this. This is really interesting. Did you, did you have one?
[00:22:53] Jeremy: Wait, do I have one? Maybe I do. I don't know.
[00:22:55] It was, it was done by Tristan by hand and released by cantaloupe music, who does a lot of like new American ensemble music, as well as jazz and other forms of composition, improvisation, and also sound art. But yeah, again, not released in any traditional listenable form other than the microprocessor itself.
[00:23:15] So Tristan Parich, who's this guy. He's a New York based artist. Uh, his expertise is in sound and math and computer coding, which has pretty much made him like a superhero of the sonic, visual, sensorial, and sculptural realms, um, over the years.
[00:23:30] His bio is way too extensive for me to like read it or talk about it, but basically he trained as a classical composer early on before or possibly while he was also at Columbia studying math and computer science. And then he later went on to do an electronic art degree at Tisch. He's been commissioned by museums to do visual kinetic art pieces, you know, like sort of sound sculptures, or like, he's got this piece that is... god, I'm going to bastardize it if I talk about this in any kind of detail, but it's basically like computational sound input that's being fed into like a drawing machine that just sort of like draws the pieces as it's being performed in real time by a computer.
[00:24:09] But he's also been commissioned by like Bang on a Can and the Calder Quartet and um, Yarn/Wire, like different sort of new music ensembles to compose pieces of music.
[00:24:19] It's interesting because he's like one of our generations, like leading American new music composers. But so much of what he does is based around like microprocessors and simple soldered electronics and stuff.
[00:24:32] He even has a project... This is actually great. I've seen this quote unquote "band" before. Um, I don't know if they're still around, but they were called Loud Objects, and it's a trio and they're literally soldering together the electronics as they're performing.
[00:24:49] Track: [music]
[00:24:55] Jeremy: You hear everything and you see everything and it's all coming together and it's all messed up and yeah.
[00:25:01] Mahea: How did you find out about him? I know that this is your world, but when did you first become aware of him?
[00:25:07] Jeremy: I first became aware of Tristan Perich's work, uh, in 2014 when he premiered this piece called "Surface Image," which was a duet between... okay, listen closely, um, the virtuosic pianist Vicky Chow and 40 one-channel speakers, playing these one bit electronics, like sine waves and square waves and triangle waves, whatever they are. They're just like these simple sort of one bit tonal patterns.
[00:25:44] It's like a 40 something minute piece of music. Vicky's connected with an iPad, showing her the score in real time, on the grand piano, as that same software is also playing back the one bit electronics out of 40 speaker channels.
[00:26:00] So I saw them do this at MoMA, PS1.
[00:26:02] Mahea: Was there significance to the number 40? Sorry to interrupt, but...
[00:26:05] Jeremy: I don't think so. I think it's just sort of like a clean... Like, when you're doing anything in multi channel, I think there's different sort of like clean numbers. There's like 4 channel, 8 channel, maybe 12, 16, 24, and then for some reason 40.
[00:26:18] But I don't know. I don't think that even really has had to do with it. I think it was just sort of like, it looked really pretty on the stage and the way that they lit it. I mean, everything was like gorgeous. It was in that sort of temporary geodesic dome that they had for a little while.
[00:26:32] But the piece is incredibly mesmerizing, but it's also like Vicky is one of the best pianists right now. I mean, she performs like the most complicated music that is like known to man. And she nailed it. But it's like that feeling when you hear like Steve Reich and it's like, things are going in and out of phase, but everything feels so tight and so on it. And every like interval of time, even as it's stretching away or closer to the previous intervals, like it all feels like elastically connected.
[00:27:05] And so to hear the physicality of the piano, so interwoven with these one bit, like simple tonal patterns... it's just this like incredible textile patchwork in like a live space, in like a real physical acoustic space... It's like one of the most like meditative and mesmerizing things in the world.
[00:27:26] Track: [music]
[00:27:27] Jeremy: That's when I first became aware of Tristan's music, but this piece came out much earlier than that, maybe 2010, I want to say. So I went back and I found out about this.
[00:27:44] But. Um, yeah, what do you guys think? I mean, I, I've got more to say about the "1-Bit Symphony" specifically, but like when you heard this, like, what do you think about this?
[00:27:54] Mahea: As Marty knows, this is not so much my world. It's fascinating to me. And I think it's very impressive. It's a little bit like, um, you know, like looking at a Rothko or something. If you tell me the name of the piece and give me a little background context, there's a chance I'm going to become emotionally immersed.
[00:28:11] Without that, it's sometimes hard for me to find the thing to connect with. Like when I first heard it, I was like, "okay, this is cool. I'm not sure what, what I'll be able to lend to the conversation here."
[00:28:21] But like just hearing you talk about it now, it suddenly becomes really interesting, which is probably an amateur perspective on it, but yeah, that's my honest take.
[00:28:29] Martin: Yeah. It's, it's interesting. I don't think I've even talked about this to you guys yet, but I just recently started assisting a composer named Raven Chacon, who is also a preeminent sort of neoclassical composer, Diné composer who won the Pulitzer last year.
[00:28:46] He does a lot of graphical scores where they're beautiful objects, they're just aesthetically gorgeous. But if you look at it, you're like, like most graphical scores, you're like, "I, what, what, so what do I do?"
[00:29:00] And then hearing the music separate from the score, if you just heard the music, you'd be like, "why is this, why is this happening? How, what is the, what is the nature of what's happening?"
[00:29:11] There's a necessary understanding of the procedural element to the art itself, to the understanding of the art itself. And I feel like this falls squarely in that category. The understanding of the process is as much the art as the end sonic result.
[00:29:26] Mahea: Totally.
[00:29:27] Jeremy: I think that's true, and I also think there are some artists that really live in that intellectual conceptual space, but Tristan Perich I think is is somebody that crosses over into so many different realms because of his multi talents like, you know, math, computer science, music, sound, visual art, everything.
[00:29:46] But there's something that is so alive about this piece and it's so organic and it really feels like something that Philip Glass would have composed, um, for like an 8 bit video game perhaps.
[00:29:59] But it's not. It's literally ones and zeros. Like, there's no music. This is not music. What you're hearing is electricity.
[00:30:07] And so that's what I think is just so fascinating. And that's kind of maybe where the science comes for me. This whole thing to me is just, it just asks questions. It doesn't necessarily need to answer those questions. It's just asking the question, like, "if I wrote a symphony using binary code, what would that look like?"
[00:30:24] "If I tried," and this is something Tristan's talked about, "if I tried to boil down all of the information that's in a symphonic work into packet of computational processing that is no heavier than a long email, What is that? What does that look like? What does that sound like? What does that feel like?"
[00:30:46] And you know, you get this kind of sense of bit crushiness, like literally, like that's actually what's happening. That's like being bit crushed.
[00:30:53] It's so digital, but it's, it just sounds so, it's like striving for humanity, right? Like, It's so emotive too. It's magic. I don't know. I, I listened to this not very often. It's not that listenable, but it's one of the most listenable, I think, pieces of quote unquote "sound art" in this world.
[00:31:12] Mahea: No, it is. Like in that initial first, like second and a half, I was like, "Oh, this is kind of long. I may not make it that far in," but by second...
[00:31:18] Jeremy: ...and then it gets emo.
[00:31:20] Mahea: Yeah. It gets like all... of a sudden I was like, "wait, I'm going to hang on. And not just because I have to for the purposes of the podcast."
[00:31:35] Track: [music]
[00:31:36] Martin: I'd be very curious to know, just like getting really nerdy about it, how he chose to tune everything.
[00:31:43] Mahea: Oh yeah.
[00:31:44] Martin: Like there's a minor third that comes in pretty quickly that like sounds like a gorgeous minor third but I don't know if it's a just intonation third, I don't know if it's equal tempered.
[00:31:52] Mahea: Hmm.
[00:31:53] Martin: Because it's all electronic, you know.
[00:31:55] Mahea: Where's he from?
[00:31:56] Jeremy: He's from New York. Oh, you mean like what school?
[00:31:59] Mahea: Well, no, I just mean like, like in terms of like what temperament he might be using, like what's, what's his natural inclination temperament wise? Because for podcast listeners, they sometimes use different tuning systems in different parts of the world. The end.
[00:32:10] Jeremy: Yeah. The tuning, I do not know.
[00:32:13] It does have a feeling of just intonation because of the digital... like it just feels like everything's too um, numerically correct to not be just intonation, but at the same time, I mean, it's all pretty diatonic to itself.
[00:32:29] I feel like the first movement and maybe most of the second movement, if not the entire second movement... it's hard for me to listen beyond that, but it tends to be in D flat major.
[00:32:37] But again, it's like the tuning could throw all that off. And uh, yeah, every now and then he does include minor scale intervals and stuff like that. But for color.
[00:32:46] I mean, it really is sort of like a Reich, Philip Glass inspired, repetitive, cyclical, diatonic kind of piece of music that just continues to unfold in front of your eyes. I don't know. Ears. Yeah.
[00:32:58] Mahea: It's interesting too, because if you think about it... I know I keep like broadening things a little further than I should, but uh...
[00:33:05] Well, I mean, like the best music is experimenting and asking questions, whether those questions are like, "how do I express the emotion of melancholy from my own perspective?" or like, "what would happen if," I don't know, "I had two different musicians in one chamber group playing in different time signatures or what..."
[00:33:21] Like the question of "why" or the question of "how" is a good way to check your own writing. Because if you're not challenging something, then you're kind of just doing like an exercise and not really pushing your your boundaries all that far.
[00:33:35] Jeremy: The villain of science is always like the status quo, right? We could keep things as they are. We could know what we know and never know anything more. Or we can strive and experiment and test new possibilities to find out something that might be good, it might be bad, but no matter what, it's going to reflect something back at our own sense of humanity.
[00:33:58] Everything in science I feel like is sort of trying to learn more about the natural world so that we can learn more about our place in it.
[00:34:04] Mahea: Yeah.
[00:34:04] Jeremy: And there's something that is just so like literal about this piece to me that is in that vein of thinking where it's like, "I'm going to build a work of art, which is what we call a 'symphony' based on purely computerized digital bits."
[00:34:20] But what does that say about like everything else we've produced in the history of humanity? Like, does it change anything? What does it say about my own work as an artist? We don't have to answer the question. We just have to ask it.
[00:34:31] Mahea: Oh, that's so deep. You've really sold me on science during this episode, Jeremy. Like I'd never thought about it, but science and music are just two different angles on the same goal. They're both attempts to understand us. That's weird.
[00:34:47] Martin: I love it.
[00:34:48] Jeremy: And with that...
[00:35:03] Track: [music]
[00:35:07] Mahea: I still kind of can't believe that I chose this for this episode. But we're listening to "Einstein on the Beach (For an Eggman)" by the Counting Crows.
[00:35:25] Jeremy, you said you were excited to talk about this song. Why?
[00:35:29] Jeremy: Well, I'll, I'll let you talk about this song, but I did want to just say that for a song that never got released on the Counting Crows actual discography, I've actually listened to this song probably more than any other Counting Crows song, which is amazing.
[00:35:45] Like my friends and I, growing up, we had pretty diverse musical tastes and we had a little kind of hodgepodge of obsessions in different musical aesthetics. But we all kind of grooved around the Counting Crows and a couple other bands for some reason.
[00:35:57] And I love the anecdote about this song. I could be misremembering this, but that it was like, they recorded it around the same time that they recorded August and Everything After, but the label said it was like too happy.
[00:36:09] Mahea: They decided they thought it was going to get overlooked. So Adam Duritz, who's the frontman in the Counting Crows said that he thinks it was recorded as early as 1991 before their debut album. But he just thought, or they thought that within the track list of everything else, it would just be ignored.
[00:36:26] But like, it's gonna be ignored if you never put it on anything and release it, you know?
[00:36:32] Jeremy: Well, but it ended up coming out on this, one of the most amazing compilations ever.
[00:36:36] Mahea: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:36:37] Jeremy: Sonic Youth, Weezer, Sloan...
[00:36:39] Mahea: But who knew that was gonna happen? You know what I mean? Like, how do you sit on a song like this for three years? Especially after a debut album, when people have that sophomore slump, how do you not just go, "Oh yeah, we have that." I'm confused by it.
[00:36:50] But yeah, like you were saying, it didn't come out on August and Everything After. It was eventually released on a compilation of rare tracks called DGC Rarities Volume 1.
[00:37:01] The compilation famously also includes Nirvana's "Pay to Play" and Weezer's "Jamie." So, It's in good company.
[00:37:08] Jeremy: And Beck, and Hole, and Sonic Youth.
[00:37:11] Mahea: Lots of good stuff.
[00:37:12] Jeremy: Oh, yeah, it's amazing. But I also remember, like, okay, this was probably Napster... like, if I'm being honest, like I'm sure...
[00:37:19] Mahea: Not LimeWire?
[00:37:20] Jeremy: One or the other, yeah, or both. Or some torrent, bit torrent, or whatever. But it was like... One of these probably kind of folders where it was like, "well, I like the counting crows. I heard them on the radio or I bought the one album. Let me try to download everything."
[00:37:36] And it just like got included in that. Like that's probably how I discovered this.
[00:37:40] But I also remember like the obvious connection to, uh, Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach. So...
[00:37:46] Mahea: ...which is the piece I, or the... that was the work I was going to pick until I rethought that yesterday afternoon. I was like, "this is such a big undertaking that my brain doesn't have the energy for."
[00:37:56] Jeremy: Well, we got to talk about it a little bit. Come on.
[00:37:58] Mahea: So there's an opera by Philip Glass called Einstein on the Beach, which is, I mean, you'll probably know more about it than I do, Jeremy, but it is, uh, an opera that sort of attempts to be non narrative.
[00:38:09] It's loosely framed around Albert Einstein as a, well, not loosely, it's framed around Albert Einstein as a character, but it doesn't necessarily, like, show a sequential story. It's just kind of moments inspired by moments in his life... is my understanding.
[00:38:22] Um, the reason I was going to pick that, and this is a stupid reason, but I'm a very big fan of the original Frasier. And I take a lot of pride in the fact that I get maybe like 50 percent of the references. And there's a reference that he makes where he says something about Einstein on the Beach, and I never got the joke. And I was like, "this is a perfect opportunity to figure out what that is about."
[00:38:43] I still don't get the joke.
[00:38:45] Jeremy: Is there like a photograph of Einstein on a beach at some point? Like, is that like, because it's so kind of like obtusely dissonant with his perceived personality or something? Like, why would this very serious man be on the beach or whatever?
[00:38:57] I don't know.
[00:38:58] Mahea: I don't know. Maybe, yeah. I didn't, I didn't get deep enough into the Philip Glass research to find out where that came from, but I do know that the opera inspired the Counting Crows song to an extent, but mostly it, it inspired the title.
[00:39:12] So there are different ways you can interpret this song. You could take it as a song that is, in fact, about Albert Einstein, in which case the lyrics allude to, like, the moral quandary of seeing your life's work and passion turned into something destructive.
[00:39:26] There are also people who think it leans more towards being a song generally about, like, failure and kind of resilience and what a person can accomplish when they accept their failure and move on instead of, like, being in denial, which is more of a Humpty Dumpty way of looking at things.
[00:39:52] Track: [music]
[00:39:56] Mahea: The John Lennon reference is interesting to me, though, because I, I don't know if it's true, but I've heard it said that "I Am the Walrus" was him kind of being like... he kept hearing that people were trying to interpret his words in this very analytical way and he didn't like it. So there's all kinds of obscure things in those lyrics that don't mean as much as you think they do.
[00:40:14] Jeremy: I have to make a brief aside just to mention that, um, Sontag Shogun, my band with Ian, who's the founder of Soundfly, and uh, our friend Jesse... we did this album last year called Valo Siroutuu, um, which was with a Finnish singer and songwriter and composer, um, named Lau Nau.
[00:40:31] And there's a moment where I took like a little mini, like, piece of audio Lau, in Finland, and then I played it backwards. And then over that backwards tape, I say," Lau is the walrus." And then I made that backwards.
[00:40:47] And that just is on the album somewhere. And it's like, it's like a secret. It's like in a secret location. And, uh, I just wanted to...
[00:40:54] Mahea: People are going to think you're dead. They're going to think you were replaced.
[00:40:59] Jeremy: I'm fine with that.
[00:41:02] Mahea: Musically, I don't think there's that much really that I want to get into with this song. It's a pretty standard rock pop alternative rock song.
[00:41:10] The chords are very diatonic and they play nicely together. It uses like basically every chord in the key of E that is friendly. It does not use that diminished D sharp, but I think it hits everything else at some point.
[00:41:24] Simple vocal harmonies that are really beautiful at a certain point.
[00:41:30] Track: [music]
[00:41:34] Mahea: But yeah, lyrically, I think that's where the meat of the song is for me, for sure.
[00:41:39] The Counting Crows are an interesting band for me because even when they write something sad, it feels upbeat. Like, I was moving around, like, folding my laundry while I listened to this yesterday and I was like, "you can't dance to music like this in a way that isn't dorky." But that's a good thing. You know, like you just can't, you kind of have to...
[00:41:53] Jeremy: They're like a live band. Like they like being on stage, you know, they like wanted to make depressing music for people that also want to have a good time.
[00:41:59] Mahea: There's an era of music like this. And I thought of this because Marty brought up the John Mayer song.
[00:42:14] Track: [music]
[00:42:15] Mahea: It's the same kind of thing where it's like, there's no way to dance to this where you don't feel like, like a dorky extra in the background of a teen movie.
[00:42:21] Martin: Is it the same key? I think it's the same key, even. Same tempo, same key.
[00:42:26] Mahea: Is it really? And you brought up that pre chorus sounds very similar to a melody in the Counting Crows song.
[00:42:31] Martin: It sounds like John Mayer stole his pre chorus from this song.
[00:42:43] Track: [music]
[00:42:46] Martin: But okay, so I've been very quiet so far in this segment, uh, because this is admittedly not in my wheelhouse. This is not my territory. I really know almost nothing about the Counting Crows other than...
[00:42:56] Mahea: Me neither.
[00:42:57] Martin: ..."Long December" is like a song I listened to when I was sad in college one time.
[00:43:02] Mahea: I mean "Mr. Jones" gets stuck in my head the second I hear it. But with the exception of that, and I think like... didn't they do like a cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" or something?
[00:43:09] Martin: Yes.
[00:43:10] Jeremy: That was really good.
[00:43:12] Mahea: If it's on, I get very happy it's on, but I don't seek it out, you know? And then like, like songs like this, I realized as soon as I put it on, I was like, "I somehow know all the lyrics to this song." I don't know how.
[00:43:22] Jeremy: Why is that?
[00:43:24] Mahea: It's catchy.
[00:43:25] Jeremy: Did you grow up around college radio? Because I definitely did.
[00:43:28] Mahea: I did not.
[00:43:29] Jeremy: Like I grew up in Westchester, New York, and I mean, there's SUNY Purchase. I'm not totally sure they ever really had a wide broadcast radio station or anything, but you could get WFUV from Fordham University, like all over the county.
[00:43:41] And I used to drive around and just listening to college radio, like all the time. And I'm pretty sure that this played a lot.
[00:43:55] Track: [music]
[00:43:56] Mahea: Initially, I was like, okay, so, so Einstein on the Beach, the opera clearly has connections to science and it makes all sorts of references throughout. But I, again, I went the slightly lazier... not slightly. I went the lazier route. I'll own that. Uh, and this... I did have to tie it to my firm belief that I just, just adopted at the beginning of this episode, that everything is science.
[00:44:19] Jeremy: Everything is science. Well, Philip Glass did not just write one opera about a scientist. He wrote maybe two, maybe more.
[00:44:26] Mahea: What's the other one?
[00:44:28] Jeremy: Um, well, one that I've seen, although you could debate that because I fell asleep and it was like three hours and I think I missed two hours of it.
[00:44:36] Mahea: Oh, you could debate that you saw it?
[00:44:37] Jeremy: Um, yeah, debate that I saw it. Uh, it was called Kepler. It was sort of like a similar revisiting of a scientist or, I don't think Kepler considered himself a scientist. I have no idea. But, um, yeah, like a revisiting of their life in this sort of like deconstructed musical form.
[00:44:54] Um, the, the Kepler opera is really great. I've listened to it, but I did go to see it and I paid a lot of money for it. And I completely fell asleep after the first like half an hour of it. Um, 'cause it's very repetitive.
[00:45:06] Mahea: I wonder if it's just they couldn't do as much with the costumes. 'Cause in the Einstein on the Beach, there's, there's like... I watched some clips of it yesterday. And there's a moment when you have a solo violinist and a massive white wig. It's just so wonderful out of context.
[00:45:20] Jeremy: Robert Wilson.
[00:45:21] Track: [music]
[00:45:28] Mahea: Is there anything else you guys want to touch on in this song before we move into the last segment of the show?
[00:45:33] Jeremy: Counting Crows... uh, I have a great memory of my life driving down to Philly from New York with my sister on a road trip, I think for her birthday. 'Cause I, we couldn't get tickets to the New York show.
[00:45:46] And so I was like, "I'm treating you to the Counting Crows, but we have to go to Philly." And it was a really good memory in my life. I like that band.
[00:45:53] Mahea: That's very sweet. Thank you for sharing that.
[00:46:04] Track: [music]
[00:46:04] Mahea: Thank you both for joining me to talk about "Songs About Science" today. I had... I mean, not a "surprisingly" good time. 'Cause I knew I would, 'cause I like you both, but science is... You know, I'm coming around to it. It was not my favorite before this taping. So thanks for doing that. Unlike Marty, I begrudgingly went to space camp because I had to.
[00:46:23] Jeremy: Science.
[00:46:25] Mahea: Anyway, anything else, anything either of you want to say before we we end things?
[00:46:30] Martin: I think we need more songs about science. I think if there's a call to action for the audience, it's get out there, start talking about how cool the world is around us.
[00:46:39] Mahea: Whereas I think all songs are about science, that doesn't mean we don't need more.
[00:46:43] Track: [music]
[00:46:46] Mahea: That's gonna do it for this one, kids.
[00:46:48] But the conversation doesn't have to stop here. We'd love to know what songs you'd select for today's theme, so let us know on X, formerly Twitter, where you can find us @ThemesVariation.
[00:47:00] I've been and will continue to be your host, Mahea Lee, and we'll be back in a couple weeks with another episode and another song theme.
[00:47:08] Thanks for listening.