Today’s Google doodle, which begins at midnight—and it’s already underway in the UK—is an animated homage to graphic designer Saul Bass, who would have been 93 on May 8 had he lived (he died in 1996).
This is a screenshot; over at the real site, press “play” and watch the fun. Music by Dave Brubeck.
You may remember some of the logos he designed (I recognized 14 out of the 18 below):
Or his movie posters, like this one:
Saul Bass Logo Design: Then and Now — The average lifespan of a Saul Bass logo is 34 years.
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Brilliant comparison.
Without exception, I find the Bass originals superior to their adulterated successors.
The High Quality version of the Doodle is up at Youtube HERE
[Handy if you want to experience it in full screen]
The Wiki for “Unsquare Dance” ~ so that’s 7/4 time ~ I can’t tell timings easily
0:14 is from Otto Preminger’s The Man With The Golden Arm
0:35 is from the opening screen title sequence to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo
I don’t have time to work out any others
or 7/8
Concentrate on the bass and claps and count to yourself,
1-2 1-2 1-2-3
Bass is on all the 1’s, claps on 2 and 2-3.
Cheers. That works!
An overview of title design by Saul Bass:
http://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/saul-bass/titles/
For my money, the title sequence for North by Northwest was the most elegant, innovative and economical in the history of cinema.
Excellent.
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I’ve rarely met a song in 7/8 (including Brubeck’s Unsquare Dance) that I can listen to for more than a minute or so. It just feels too self-correcting at various points in the song as the musicians try to adapt to the “unnatural” time signature.
5/4 is one of the only time signatures that’s not 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8 that I’ve ever heard that can work well for an extended period of time (namely, Brubeck’s Take Five, and the theme to the original Mission Impossible (not the movie)).
There are a few famous things in 7 that work OK. “Money” from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is one. Another is the very end of Stravinsky’s Firebird, but my favorite is the last movement of Prokofiev’s 7th piano sonata.
The most astounding thing in 5 is surely the 2nd movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony.
There is an oral tradition that reached Simon Karlinsky, that he published in Christopher Street (11:3 16-21), that the 6th, the Pathétique / Патетическая (Pateticheskaya = passionate, not pathetic) Symphony has a hidden gay programme, which is the reason Modest persuaded Piotr Ilyich not to call it Programnaya (sp).
The famous love theme in the first movement represents one of some of Tchaikovsky’s male loves, and the rapid struggling theme, the homophobia he experienced and his struggles against it.
I put it to Karlinsky that the 5-4 of the second movement might represent our unconventional gay dance of life, and he liked the idea (and that the tonic-dominant harmony of the very un-military 3rd movement march, again contrary to the usual, had the same motive), but we have no basis for any of this but conjecture.
Karlinsky also had several suggestions as to who were the gay lovers being mourned in the last movement.
one or some
A lot of this is cultural, though, too. It’s not at all uncommon to hear Talas in Indian music that have “odd” or “unnatural” numbers of beats in their cycles. 7 is quite common…
Here’s one in a very very slow 14! Subbulakshmi was a freaking incredible Carnatic musician.
The Dies Irae in Britten’s War Requiem is in 7-4, and makes you wonder what other time it could ever be written in.
“Quam olim Abrahae” in the Offertorium is in 6-8 9-8 6-8, also unlikely but it works amazingly well.
The Agnus Dei is in 5-4, but so evenly the time-signature is not manifest.
If you think of 7/8 as a waltz with a drawn-out third beat, then it stops feeling awkward and suddenly feels like the most elegant of swinging. That’s especially the case with Brubeck.
Its inverse, after a fashion, is 8/8 = 3+3+2/8. It was one of the favorites of the band, Rush, and tends to produce a much more frenetic, unbalanced, driving feel. Further confounding matters — and Rush loved to and did with great effect — is that 8/8 and 4/4 (common time) share the same total number of beats. That lets you not only seamlessly shift from the one to the other, but it lets you superimpose, say, an 8/8 melodic line over a 4/4 harmonic line — or vice-versa if you really want to throw your audience off-balance.
Even further, 8/8 can also be formulated as 2+3+3/8 or 3+2+3/8, giving the composer even more room for mischief. There are compositions where even skilled musicians tend to have trouble keeping up….
As I mentioned, Rush mastered this type of rhythmic interplay. Tom Sawyer belongs in every upper-division / graduate Form and Analysis class, though I doubt it’s made it into very many such syllabi.
Cheers,
b&
I just get a plain image… 🙁
6 songs that are hard to dance to [& one that isn’t]
List includes the awful [in the original sense] industrial ear bleed that is the March Of The Pigs by Nine Inch Nails in 7/8 [Video]
I just now got around to watching the Google Doodle. I wonder how many others got the North by Northwest h/t? One of my favorite movies and I just happen to live in (my options were limited…you could say I could not have chosen otherwise..the appliance stores were out of used refrigerator boxes) in Rapid City, SD. LOL