Session Transcript:
Daniel Wang
Red Bull Music Academy, Melbourne 2006

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

What exactly are we talking about when we refer to a 4/4 beat? Disco? House? Techno? Blues? Rock? Excuse me?! Shut off your mobiles and computers and start to concentrate! One of dance music’s finest, Mr.Danny Wang, will teach you a lesson that is deeper than the Mariana Trench. In explaining why dance music goes back at least a hundred years he touches topics from the beginning of mechanical music to contemporary house. Throw in a nightingale, an East German transsexual and her collection of 'Spieluhren' and a crash course in vogueing and you’re all set. Once upon a time…

RBMA: »How many people here are actually familiar with Mr. Danny Wang?«

Danny Wang: »Alright.«

RBMA: »Aaah.«

Danny Wang: »Thank you, but I don’t expect everyone to know me. I’m not a superstar like that.«

RBMA: »If you have the slightest interest in disco music, you might have come across his label Balihu Records. Which means what? Balihu?«

Danny Wang: »It was actually a nonsense word. A ballyhoo in English means a big commotion, like a big noise, aaarghh. But it’s actually a nonsense word. Because when I made the label everybody was saying "spiritual grooves, deep house" and I just wanted to avoid attaching that kind of meaning to it. It should be kind of nonsense, it should just be anything you want it to be. You know, ever since the word disco was invented, how many words do we have now for what we call dance music? Trip hop, blablabla, 2-step, drum 'n' bass, the point of all this is the possibilities of music over a four/four beat. And it’s been that way for about a hundred years, actually. Blues was music over a four-four beat, rock is, bossa nova is so I wanted to not attach, say: "This is house," or you know? I just used the word disco a lot because since the '70s when this was all invented, about 1973 officially, this is the proper birth date of disco, that’s Love Is The Message, that’s the whole Philly sound, Gamble & Huff, if you’re familiar with it. You know, we’re playing with the same idea since that time for the past 33 years or so. And it’s been called disco since that time, and it was a so much more open word back then. It’s kind of like a tower of babel where everything split apart and into different genres, but it's obviously like a big tree they go back to the same root. We’re going to have lots of very corny metaphors here today, I apologize, but I didn’t say disco.«

RBMA: »But didn’t you start Balihu back then initially to get DJ gigs?«

Danny Wang: »Well, yeah, because I realised the only way in 1993 anybody would get a gig, I mean, this is 1993, Danny Tenaglia and Junior Vasquez.«

RBMA: »We’re talking about New York, right?«

Danny Wang: »We’re talking about New York, and still I feel this way. Nobody needs an openly homosexual Chinese/American DJ pop star. I still don’t think it’s ever going to happen and that’s OK. I’m happy to do my own thing. But I realised the only way to get any attention and to say: “OK, here is someone who obviously knows something about disco and house music,” is: make a record. So I just took all this records, I took 17 samples, because everybody was sampling at that time, and just strung them together and made a sort of parody record. OK, here is my idea if you want to sample all the old disco records. But, of course, the joke was that you couldn’t recognize a single one. Or you could recognise about three out of 17. And there was this sort of joke on it, like if anybody recognises all these records, I’ll give you a trip to Paris or something. Eventually, one person named a few samples.«

RBMA: »But not all?«

Danny Wang: »Not all, no.«

RBMA: »Should we maybe show one of your early tracks?«

Danny Wang: »Alright. What shall we do about the DVD? OK.«

RBMA: »Or do you want to show the little piece?«

Danny Wang: »Let’s do this little introduction first for five minutes, and then, it’s slightly sentimental, but since we’ve spent three hours yesterday talking about what somebody did in the bedroom at the age of 18, we could spend five or six minutes and watch a poetic, lovely video of a Hans-Christian Andersen fairytale about music, and about life and other things. And then we’ll come back to the proper topics here, OK?«

RBMA: »It actually should play now.«

Danny Wang: »I have no idea what he wants to play us.«

RBMA: »It’s one of Danny’s early works.«

Danny Wang: »Probably it’s not even me. Probably, I just stole it from some old disco record.«

RBMA: »Erm, we’ve got no sound here. The guys don’t care?«

Danny Wang: »No, I think they hear us. We have to sing it ourselves.«

(video starts)

RBMA: »Oh, so we’re going to have to watch the fairytale first.«

Danny Wang: »Should we watch the fairytale? OK, well, let’s watch the fairytale. Hold on, can we pause the video for just a minute? Can we do the first segment? There is a one minute segment, or is that difficult? Alright, I should introduce this. This may seem silly, I know, but I’ve found this DVD yesterday for five dollars in one of the tourist shops. And it happens to be the Hans-Christian Andersen tale, does everyone know The Emperor’s Nightingale? You know this. How many people? It’s a story, right, you know it?! No? Then we should see this, actually. It’s the story of the emperor of China who lives inside a beautiful palace, beautiful walls, he has courtiers, everybody is polite to him, bowing down to him. He’s the master of the universe. But he lives in a world that’s artificial, everything is glass, everything is diamonds, everything is gold and beautiful. And then one day a sailor, who is from Holland or something, comes to China, brings him a book and says there is this beautiful bird called the nightingale. It’s this funny thing that lives in your forest and it sings every night and has the most beautiful song (laughs). I feel like a grandfather. So the king sends everybody out in the forest to find the nightingale and bring it back. The nightingale is not beautiful, you know? It’s grey, small bird, kind of ugly. It’s just very plain, really. The bird sings and it’s so beautiful that the emperor cries, and every night thinks of this bird. But he realises that he can’t tie the bird down, the bird wants to fly, the bird is a living thing, it walks around the court, it doesn’t follow the rules, it’s a wild bird. So the sailor, somebody from another country, sends him a mechanical bird, which is what we see here. A perfect, covered with gold and diamonds, and it sings every tune perfectly over and over again. This is sort of a metaphor.«

RBMA: »So this is where we are today? The sweet music disappeared and now the machines took over?«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, it’s actually quite amazing because I think the tale was written in 1880 or something. When did Hans-Christian [live]? Google? Anybody have their computer on? When did Hans-Christian Andersen live? «

RBMA: »I think about…«

Danny Wang: »1880, I think. And this is actually the beginning already of mechanical music. In fact, let’s talk a little history right now. I’ve been living in Berlin for the past three years and there are these amazing machines from about 1900 to 1910, in fact I can draw them for you. Now, this becomes practical (steps to the flip chart). Here’s another question. If anybody has the answer for these Chinese bells, what are they for? From 2800 years ago. The answer will be revealed later in this lecture. Erm, but in Germany if you go, there are these huge things called Spieluhr, and they look like this. Gerd, have you seen these things?«

RBMA: »Erm, I don’t think so.«

Danny Wang: »OK, well, they are also in the Victorian Albert Museum in London, if you go. Just imagine this is covered with dots. These things are about from 1900, and they were actually like the first mechanical hand crank things. They’re huge, I mean, they’re this big (shows approximate size of spieluhr). Or they can be this big and people already had dance parties, I’m talking DJ dance parties in 1900 to 1910 using large mechanical wheels. There is even a strange woman in East Germany called Charlotte von Mahlsdorf or something. She was a transsexual East German in the '60s and went from becoming a man to a woman and collected these things. She had thousands of them and they are in this archive in East Germany. I’ve yet to see these, but I’m told they exist, and a lot of them were lost. Again, this DJ thing is going back over a hundred years already, and the invention of mechanical music also goes back a hundred years. So, yes, I think we’re in a state of mechanical music having almost completely replaced…«

RBMA: »Sweet music?«

Danny Wang: »Organic, human-played music. «

RBMA: »But maybe we should show them what you did as you started out.«

Danny Wang: »So, this is how Gerd and I got to know each other, and you know what? Let’s do an overview, because I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m going to sit here and talk for three hours about what I do. In fact, this whole talk, I hope, will be about ten minutes now, five minutes about myself and the rest is about... (asks participants to open their handouts) Can we open the thing, please? Let’s take an overview. Alright, if you go to the second page, some things to think about. First things that came to mind - it’s personal opinion again - it’s perfectly alright to be asocial and it’s OK not to like or buy stuff, because we’re all here and we want to be polite, we want to be nice to each other, and lots of people here, I think almost everybody here is talented and has something to say. If I were running this camp, I’d almost want to say turn off the computer, turn off the mobile, and turn off the email. Myspace especially. People who really concentrate on music, does anyone know Eric Satie? We all know Eric Satie, right? Yes, famous theme. Does anyone know how he died? He’d lived alone in a room for 15 years, and when he died he was covered with old newspapers and umbrellas, because he was so afraid that every time he went out he was afraid of rain or something like that. He collected old umbrellas. And you know how he actually made music, right? Why he started making ambient music? Because there was too much loud accordeon music in the cafés, and I was thinking this yesterday when the radio show was blasting out over the speakers during dinner. He simply wanted quieter music so he could digest his food. There actually have been studies by the American military in the '50s and '60s that say loud music with rhythm actually disturbes digestion and it’s not good for your health. I really wanted to put on some Satie during dinner yesterday. Number two, why we’re here. What we’re going to explain in a minute. Just as a painter you can not only use one color and straight lines to paint, it’s really about expanding our minds, our understanding of chords, and melodies, and harmonies, and also tone palettes, which we will get into in a little bit. Let’s see, I’m going to jump down a bit here, and I think maybe what always scared me most of all about modern music is the amount of force that entails. I mean, you’re talking about 120 db’s of sound coming at you. We kind of live in a ‘might makes right’ world right now with George Bush running things and everything. Whoever has the biggest bomb wins, but I don’t think that should be the case, and you probably don’t either. Might should not make right, especially as music, but like it or not, even though so many DJs talk about peace and love and whatever, I think they follow the exactly same principle. Whatever is loudest, and thickest and fattest is what cuts through, and the rest doesn’t really matter. Frankly, it’s a great way to destroy everything that’s great around you. And probably the thing that bothers me most of all is things like MTV, because as we all know music has been going downhill probably since about the early '80s. It’s exactly when MTV came in. This is when the picture and propaganda replaced music. More often than not, almost always, music is basically marketed towards a social group. It’s saying: “You’re gay, you’re listening to this music. You’re black, listen to this music. You’re white, listen to this music.” And MTV has enforced that, and no matter what, we can’t avoid it, even in what we do, thinking this is right. But looking at music as a pure, I don’t want to say pure mathematic or scientific phenomenon, but in the root, of course, in the '60s and '70s there were no such distinctions. I mean, everybody was into disco, it all came together: Latin music, salsa percussion, rock, blues, classical. It was all there and there was really no distinction. The idea that there should be any distinction is purely a marketing ploy designed to separate people. This might be totally obvious, but we have to start with this premise, beginning. At any point of the lecture somebody says: "Oh, that’s not black music, that’s not real," or: "Oh, that’s not a proper classical transition, Bach would never have played that." I think we have to throw that out. So, thinking this, I started making records and this is how Gerd and I met. And what are we supposed to hear now? Should we hear something that…? This is not necessarily something I’m proud of, this is maybe something I produced that you like.«

RBMA: »Yeah, that I like and you did at a very early stage, and I think you’re pretty dissatisfied these days with what you did back in the days.«

Danny Wang: »Erm, I should say the first records I really just sampled a lot of stuff, I just took things that I liked. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve done a theory course in college, primarily learn to apply it, and I think people say often that there is a ten year rule: you start out doing something and then ten years later you’ll come to the revelation of how all the knowledge you’ve acquired actually applies to what you do. It takes a while, actually.«

RBMA: »Do you get a lot of flack for your opinion?«

Danny Wang: »Actually, less and less. I can’t even believe I’m here, and people are giving me a chance to speak to so many people.«

RBMA: »Because your views are pretty… how do you say?«

Danny Wang: »Oh, view, OK. Let’s go to the first page now and see what we’re actually going to talk about and see what we think about those views. We’re going to listen to some records first of all, so you don’t sit here in silence again. It’s so boring to listen to somebody talking about their opinion and not hear what they’re actually talking about. OK, here we go.«

RBMA: »So, back to the beginning.«

Danny Wang: »OK.«

(music: Danny Wang - unknown)

RBMA: »You still were using samples for this?«

Danny Wang: »This is a sample from two songs that I strung together.«

(music continues)

»I think the beat stays out here and becomes the actual … There’s a jazz guitar by a '70s funk group called Trussel, and it was actually a big disco hit, it’s on your big disco list here. Big disco list. OK, it’s all stolen, OK?«

(applause)

»I didn’t make it, I just strung it together. And actually I could never find the people to pay anyhow. It was MCA. So in case you’re wondering, on later records I put all the samples on the label and just said: “Here are the originals, and if you like this, then you should just go buy the original.«

RBMA: »But it’s still a great record.«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, it’s a re-edit, because I took the best parts of that record, which are actually very short. That guitar solo is like this long, it’s 20 seconds, and I just extended it and made it longer.«

RBMA: »And it’s a great record to dance to, and have fun to.«

Danny Wang: »You bring the slogan. Let’s do a quick overview, OK? In this package you will find, what do we find? Overview: Personal journey, we’re talking about how I got into this whole thing, that’s, I hope, the only personal part. Page one, and then: Finding records. I started seeing this list. Now we’re on to page one and two. See these lists here? So I was living in San Francisco, this is about 1991, and my friend said: “You’ve got to see this magazine. There are these two gay black guys from Chicago who put out a big list of all the records that were house records for them up and until about 1987.” Which was already amazing, this is 1991, you know? There were some Strictly Rhythm records, that was it. No one talked about house music the way they do now. People didn’t really even talk about techno that much either. Like Derrick May was saying yesterday, only in a few warehouse parties. And here was this list of a hundred records that I’ve never heard of, and furthermore you go out to the record shop and they would be everywhere for two or three dollars. And you’ll recognise some of these. Should we go down the list a bit? Does everyone know what Love Is The Message is?«

(participants respond)

»Most? Kind of. Erm, Love Is The Message is the number one house, the first [record], 1973, what I was talking about. The invention of house music. And then we go down the list. I think Trussel, the thing that was just sampled, was number 60, I Love It by Trussel. We just went and found this record for like three dollars, and it was just amazing. So I decided I would go, and you would get these things on bootlegs, I went to every record shop, and I wouldn’t stop until I found every record on this list, and found out why they were good. A lot of times I would buy them and think, 'This is total crap, why would anybody play this?' Because I was getting into Strictly Rhythm and all this stuff at the time. And the bass drum sometimes was really tiny, sometimes it was really corny and kitschy. Like Clark Sisters – You Brought The Sunshine is actually kind of a swingbeat. It’s like a ‘bam ba ba dah…’ (sings) That kind of beat. It’s not at all disco. And this is for your reference by the way, too (shows the list), because maybe you go and check out some of these records.«

RBMA: »This is Love Is The Message.«

(music: MFSB - Love Is The Message)

Danny Wang: »Love Is The Message, you have it!«

RBMA: »Yeah.«

Danny Wang: »Love Is The Message is also called the Brooklyn National Anthem. Has anybody seen the movie Paris Is Burning? You know this movie? It’s the gay, black drag queen movie about vogueing, about the whole… Should we do this?«

(gets up to demonstrate vogueing)

»Alright, you can do the bus stop to this song, pretty much. Everything’s on the four/four. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, right? It’s also going … ‘bam, bam, bam, bam…’ And I would go out to clubs and just see kids, mostly gay black or Latino kids, or two or three Korean kids who would spend all night [vogueing] just ‘bam, bam, bam, bam’, everything on the beat. All the time. This became an obsession, for hours. And it came from this song, and also there even old school rap stars like Doug E. Fresh rapping over this record.«

RBMA: »I know EPMD sampled this for It’s Time To Party.«

Danny Wang: »And again, going back to this theme of not making any difference between black music, white music, gay music, whatever. It was all one thing back in 1973. Nobody cared. There was no gangster rap, there was none of that. Actually, there were a lot of hip hop stars that who really are gay and they won’t admit it. Thank you, Love Is The Message. Alright, let’s move on a little bit. Alright, from this record actually I started thinking, 'How can we possibly get back to the stage where we start these kind of sounds again?' It’s also a crucial record, because if you listen to the bassline…«

(turns on the keyboard and plays a bassline)

»All disco up until about 1984/’85 is based around a two-bar bassline, and again there is a reason for this because it’s based around blues changes. The bassline of Love Is The Message is basically …«

(plays bassline on the keyboard)

»There it is, OK? Four notes, very simple. ‘Bam, bam, bam, bam…’ Alright? Four simple notes, and I’m going to transpose it actually, so it is a bit easier to play. So, let’s go down here. Alright? Basically, what you really have is a simple movement of an F chord to a C chord. Two bars, one, two, three, four. Next, one, two… One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, two bars. It’s very interesting when you look at what I started realising. When you get to house music around ‘87/’88, House Music Anthem, does that ring a bell for anybody? (sings) 'Gotta have house music', with piano riffs. The bassline, at some point it even becomes one bar, it becomes…«

(plays bassline on the keyboard)

»Let’s see. Dam, dam, dam, dam… Let’s make that bassy so it sounds better. And everything started to becoming one bar, and I was thinking, 'Why did this happen?' Everything became repetitive suddenly in ’87, and with only one bar it was impossible to have any harmonic progression.«

(...)

»At about age 17 or 18, well, 14 or 15 you start discovering sexuality. And there is one thing this thing certainly doesn’t talk about. What role sexuality plays in music.«

RBMA: »What role did it play?«

Danny Wang: »For you or me?«

RBMA: »In regards to music.«

Danny Wang: »I can’t, you know, that’s a good question. Well, when I discovered I was gay I was going out to gay clubs and listening to house music. And it wasn’t just that, because most of the time they weren’t so much gay clubs, they were actually always more black people than gay people in general. But the really strong intention, the people who really danced were the gay people, obviously. The gay black people…«

(demonstrates exaggerated dancing)

»You know, doing all this. Or to say it simply: They tell me to be free. They tell me to just throw all your cares away and don’t be embarrassed, don’t be ashamed. That’s what the whole vogueing and breakdancing… you know, you look ridiculous. You do look ridiculous spinning on your head on the floor. But if you do well enough and your soul is in it, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. And that’s probably the biggest lesson that soul music and black music taught the entire rest of the world for the past hundred years. That is: 'Be free, let it out, put your body' - like Stephanie Mills sings: "Put your body into the music," and don’t let it only be in your head. That’s one of the most important things. Like, people said of Chaka Khan, you know: "I’m every woman." (sings Chaka Khan - I’m Every Woman) She’s one of the greatest singers, because she sings with her whole body. And if you look at it, actually all the great soul singers are that way. They sing with their whole body. It’s also very interesting because obviously microphone recording made a lot of things possible. Like in the '50s, ever since the time of Chet Baker people say Chet Baker and Ella Fitzgerald wouldn’t even be possible without the microphone, because these people were not 'AAAHHHH' singing - that actually kind of comes back in the '60s and '70s with the divas - they would be whispering into the microphone sometimes, and without a microphone it wouldn’t be possible. I mean, why do you have opera and this ‘OOOHHHH’… (imitates opera singing) ...this kind of singing in the 18th century? There’s no other way to amplify the sound in a big concert hall.«

RBMA: »So technology is a good thing?«

Danny Wang: »Technology is many times a wonderful thing. And also I want to say this thing about repetitive. There is always this conflict between: 'Do I want to create tension and building all the way Bach and Debussy and, you know, all these classical people wrote orchestras?' But there is such a thing as getting into trance. Where is our mathematics professor here? Who is that guy who I was talking with yesterday?«

RBMA: »I think you’re talking about Richard, but he’s …«

Danny Wang: »Richard is not a participant?«

RBMA: »No.«

Danny Wang: »He’s not? OK, I’m sorry.«

RBMA: »He just cares for them.«

Danny Wang: »Oh, does anyone know Richard, your caretaker? Richard is the tall guy. He actually studies mathematics, and he showed me this incredible graph yesterday about certain chaos patterns. You know, chaos patterns are these goofy things… (tries to demonstrate chaos with his hands and weird sounds) And the more you look at them they keep on changing, you know, they do that. And there are other different kinds of mathematical formulas which destroy behaviour and populations. Behaviours in human beings like smoking tobacco, and it is interesting, you start off at any point, and the graph he showed me looked like this. Hey, paper (rediscovers the flip chart). This is a Spieluhr. The graph was fascinating, it looked like this. And you start out with this very simple mathematical formula, where’s my other pen? Oh, here it is. OK, this is just a random mathematical formula. This is X, this is Y. For X we have -1, erm, let’s see, -1/3X +X2 and then for Y = -4. Something like that. Really simple, OK?! You start out with a dot here.«

RBMA: »Not that simple.«

Danny Wang: »OK? The graph looks like this, it bends, it bends, it bends. This is exactly how it looks. And after a while strangely, no matter what numbers you put in, the graph freezes. It just stays right there, it doesn’t move. This destroys the behaviour’s patterns, obviously it stays inside of our brains. It seems to me to prove that there is such a thing as a locking groove. That you get into this trance and you just don’t get out of it, and it feels really good. I’m not going to argue with that, because if it feels good, you know, do it. So I’m not denying that there is this thing, at a certain point there is also a thing called boredom. I mean, after a while it’s like, 'How much more?', like the emperor with the nightingale. I don’t need to say anymore, a picture says a thousand words. How do we at the same time get the wonderful lessons of African music, of falling into a trance, of having repetition, of having: ‘Bududumbududumbududum’? And the time of having, grabbing classical progressions and all those things that really make music beautiful. I think it’s possible to have both of those things. A lot of those lessons, in a very naïve way, what people put together is disco music, in the '70s is probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to that. Because when you look at everything, from Abba to Van McCoy – The Hustle, I’m going to play that in a minute, the structures are so similar to what people like Bach were already doing in 1780. Bach basically did equal temper, this we’re going to move onto in just about three minutes, I hope. When Bach created equal temperament keyboard, which is… (demonstrates equal temperament keyboard) OK, are we there? Not a pretty sound, let’s change the sound a bit. That’s so buzzy. When Bach started playing with this equal temperament keyboard around 1780, I think, he really laid down all the rules that should be used up and until now for the next 250 years.«

RBMA: »What would you recommend to an 18-year old kid these days feeling the urge to do music?«

Danny Wang: »Oh, yeah: don’t get a computer! There is this believe, and even here, but yes, it disturbed me a little bit. Then I found, Tom showed me the other instruments. When I first came here they showed me the upstairs rooms and the instrument room was closed, and I didn’t see the control room. And I saw eight rooms with eight computers and bare walls, and I thought, ’This is the last thing, this is the last way anybody should have their introduction to music’. It’s totally false, because this believe that you have this computer there that has all the capabilities, all you have to do is press the button. I think I actually don’t really need to tell you this. You know, music is a physical thing, it’s a tactile thing. You have to be able to touch it, and hit it, and play it, and every instrument has a different nuance. A guitar has different ways of tuning it, you can tune a guitar so it doesn’t even sound like a regular guitar. You know, all this, all lost on a computer. A computer is exactly that mechanical bird that you see in the video in the beginning. I think I’m stating the obvious here.«

RBMA: »But computers did great things too.«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, I know. I record on a hard drive recorder too. I mean, it’s a box, actually. It’s 12 track box. Computers are lovely if…«

(inaudible question from participant)

Danny Wang: »Yeah, please.«

Participant: »You think that people should maybe play an instrument before having a computer?«

Danny Wang: »Yes, I think that would help, but I think that’s not the only way. I mean, you can use the computer to learn. I actually used the computer, I feel, in the end to learn what all this stuff is about. It did help.«

Participant: »I’m just saying, definitely where I grew up a lot of music that comes out wouldn’t have come out if it wasn’t for computers, and there is like a whole scene. Because people could afford computers, and I guess a lot of us wouldn’t be doing music.«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, me too.«

Participant: »Yeah, I don’t know. I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t know what…«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, I think you’re right. I think obviously it’s both ways. We really should move on to this topic, and I don’t want to keep you here all day, OK? But I hope there is enough substance that it can keep us interested. Even the piano was after all considered technology. And this was rejected by most, this scale was basically rejected because it actually doesn’t have pure tonality. And this we’re going to get into right here.«

(...)

»Who knows La Marseillaise, the French national anthem (looks for participant who can sing La Marseillaise)? Sing the first phrase, erm, wait. Someone who hasn’t. Who? Who’s French here? Que francais? Who? Come on, I’m serious. Somebody. (one participant sings La Marseillaise) Wait, sing it. Loud.«

(Danny and participant sing La Marseillaise and Danny plays it on his keyboard)

»That’s the fourth. Alright, what about the fifth? Who knows the Theme from Star Wars (laughter)? Seriously. I mean, that’s such a standard thing. Star Wars, somebody sing Star Wars. Star Wars, fifth. (participant sings theme from Star Wars) Yeah, there we go.«

(now Danny sings theme from Star Wars followed by a keyboard version)

»Fifth. OK, that’s the fifth. This is the closest thing you’ll get in nature to an absolute pure harmony, except for the octave. That’s the octave, there’s your fifth, right? And it also gives us that slightly Chinese weird sound. Alright. So it’s sort of like, what’s that thing? You know that funny little, I’m trying to think of, there’s a funny little game with sticks that I can’t remember, you keep on adding a stick. Alright, we’re going to have to do this.«

(Danny turns his keyboard towards the audience so they can see the keys)

»You know what? I think I’m just going to have to turn this around and show you here. OK? So we got this.«

(plays melody)

»’Doo doo’, right? We find midway point. All these notes don’t exist. Why did we get a scale that says ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’?«

(sings scale)

»Why isn’t it…?«

(sings fictious scales)

»Why isn’t it that? Why do we accept that this is the correct way to play notes.«

Participant: »It sounds nice.«

Danny Wang: »Especially out of tune. Thank you. Alright, we have nothing here. We have only these two notes, we’re in year 3000 BC. How do we find the next notes in the scale? We know this sounds good. ‘Dam dam’, Star Wars is another five thousand years before it comes around.«

(inaudible comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »Exactly. Thank you, I’m so glad someone said that. So now we’ve got another note, and we know for sure, that this note is harmonic, right? Because this is harmonic, and this is harmonic, right? So now we’ve got a G here, let’s go up an octave. G – G. Now we’ve got two notes in the octave. So what can we do with these two notes? Someone else, don’t answer. What am I going to do with these two notes? Keep on going on, right? So this is the circle of fifth. What’s the midpoint between G and G? D. ‘Da daa’ .«

(sings Star Wars theme again)

»Right? Now I’ve got three notes on my scale. What do I do with the D? What’s the fifth of D?«

(plays the scale and sings his version of the Star Wars theme)

»Alright, let’s move it down a bit. So we have A. What’s the fifth of A? E, thank you. Someone knows their stuff here. Wait, there’s someone here who’s like a classical opera ‘bla bla bla’ thing here, right? You? What are you doing here, anyway?«

Participant: »I don’t know.«

(laughter)

Danny Wang: »OK. Alright, so there’s the E, ‘da daa’. E, right? And this will go on and on. E, E. Let’s just do this all the way through just to prove that this actually works. E-E, B-B, that’s the octave b to B. What’s the midpoint of B? What’s the fifth of B? One, two, one, two, three, four, five. Now we’re done with all the white keys, we move on to the black keys. B-B, midpoint is G flat. OK, now, ‘bam baam’. I just moved down an octave so we can keep on playing upwards. ‘Na naa’. Midpoint is this. ‘Na, naa’, alright, there is midpoint. Right, and the midpoint is here. Move up. And then here. And then midpoint goes to here. Am I right? Hold on.«

(demonstrates scale on the keyboard)

»Right, there’s the midpoint now. We’re talking B flat here now. B flat, I think I skipped something here. No, no that’s right. B flat, move to F, that’s the fifth. Star Waaars. We’re still correct. And then F-F, midpoint is C. We’re back, right?! So in theory circle of fifth should be perfect. Am I right? We just made a whole circle. Everything harmonises with the other, and actually this is totally wrong. In nature there is a very weird discrepancy, but on the keyboard it may sound right. Let’s look at mathematically what we just did. I was really afraid the we never get like heavy, but now you know that I’m not just here bullshitting you. OK, and then here we move on to, let’s see, the scales. Quick point, why am I saying this? Because we have to recognise, first of all, why the notes are even there in the first place, and second of all, why an equal tempered scale, which is exactly what every computer program, Reason, bla bla bla. I shouldn’t be saying this, because Propellerheads wants me to work on something for them. Saying, "Don’t buy any software synths." What you get off every equal tempered anything, that’s all you ever going to get. You never going to get the fine colors. It’s like somebody is asking you to do a painting with only red, blue, yellow and green, and you don’t have purple, you don’t have green, you don’t have pink, you don’t have any of the finer shades. So we go on to, let’s take a look at 'tuning In'. And for anybody who’s seriously into electronic music, I have to recommend, this is the bible.«

(shows a sheet of paper)

»This book, although I don’t have all the pages inside, shows you all the different possibilities. There are a hundred ways that this could be split up besides into 12 equal notes.«

(plays a note on the keyboard)

»And all those colors in between, every shade of purple, and pink, and brown, and gold, every color you can possibly imagine is there. Only, we don’t use it, because the more we get sucked into Midi, and especially, big no-no, auto-tuners. You know, Christina Aguilera, ahhhh, and everything is perfectly tuned, everything is perfectly in pitch, Beyoncé, whatever. Sounds like shit. And there is a reason for it, OK? Let’s take a look. 'Tuning In', alright?! And here we have the sense. Alright, this is a perfect equal temperament keyboard interval, 0 to 1200.«

(shows interval on paper and then plays scale on keyboard)

»On the right side you see pure and sense of pure, which means pure ratios. Like what is this? What is 440 and 880? In the middle, it’s a half, right? Like, you might say 440 multiplied by three is, let’s do this. «

(calculates on flip chart)

»440 hertz equals hertz. Next octave up is 880 hertz. How do I get here? Multiplied by three times two, right? 440 hertz, go up an octave, take it in half, equals 660, right? OK, so let’s look mathematically, how we derive the modern day scale, and how actually this discrepancy which shows us this keyboard is not quite right? We go to the next page, this is page 12. Are we there? The famous Pythagorean comma. Pythagoras is also the man who invented the Pythagorean theory. Does anyone remember geometry from school or whatever? OK, what have we done here twelve times? We’ve gone up, we should come back to zero. So we’ve taken 440, and we’ve basically gone up one time three halves, this is what we did now in math. We multiplied 440 once by three, so we get 660, right? We did this twelve times, am I right? OK, so what we have is here three halves to the 12th power. Three half by three half by three half by three half by three half, OK? And we’ll bring it down. And we went up about half an octave every time, so we’re going to reset it to the original. You have to have to take this for faith, because I can’t draw it out. The keyboard would be too long if we did this. Seventh, we should come back to zero. Does this actually make zero? No, it is equal to exactly this number. Looks strange. 531.441 divided by 524.288. Does anyone have a calculator here, because I couldn’t find one. Somebody has their computer on? Does somebody have a computer?«

RBMA: »Richard can do this in his head, maybe (laughter).«

Danny Wang: »Mathematics professor? I’m serious, because if we look at the numbers we can actually look at how far off we are. Can somebody do this right now, please? OK. So let’s multiply the number 440 by this ratio. OK? 440 multiplied by this, what is the result? «

Participant: »440.«

Danny Wang: »440, a concert, naaahhh. I’m not in perfect pitch. This multiplied by this. Huh?«

Participant: »446.«

Danny Wang: »About 446, right? So what happened? We thought we were playing perfect harmonies, and everything was going to end up exactly back at the C. But it didn’t, did it? If I had the answer I would be a genius. This is one of those mysteries in nature that’s actually never been solved. And it’s one of the, I think, strange, mystical, beautiful things in music and mathematics. These irrational numbers. We don’t know why it is, but a fifth is perfectly harmonious with the one.«

(demonstrates on the keyboard)

»But if you keep going up fifths it comes closer and closer to harmonising with the original one, but it never actually makes it. It’s a spiral, and this where we’re looking here, OK? If you read down the paragraph…«

RBMA: »But, Danny. Where’s the emotion in this equation?«

Danny Wang: »Where’s the emotion in this equation? Well, if we believe, this is difficult, do we accept on faith that harmonious music such as…«

(plays chord on keyboard)

»…feels little better than?«

(plays minor chord on keyboard)

»Oh, not that necessarily. Let’s say…«

(plays strange chord on keyboard)

»We accept on faith that this…«

(plays chord on keyboard)

»…sounds prettier than…«

(plays strange chord on keyboard)

»Well, some dramatics there, that’s not really fair, is it?«

(laughter)

»Alright, if we accept that on faith, then we proceed. This is when we’re saying the beautiful. We have to accept that vibrations work in harmony with each other is beautiful. 440, so we have what? Oh, so we have this. Rather than this, we have this.«

(draws on flip chart)

»This is what the circle of fifths actually looks like. Or you might say it’s like this. This is 440 hertz. Can everybody see this? OK, this is 880, right?! This is a circle of fifth ideally. This is equal, you might say equal temperament, it’s not ideal, actually. What is the reality? It’s 446. 880 divided by 2 is 440, OK? It’s 446 something. How do we reconcile this? Well, we’ve got a little extra thing here, right? That little part, that’s called, and by the way, there’s a name. Thank god this is actually working, because I’ve only done this once in my whole life for an audience. So there is the Pythagorean comma, it just means it’s an anomaly, it’s something we can’t explain. It’s an extra little, like a human being born with a tail. What do you do with it? You’ve got to cut it off, well, you’ve got to use it somehow. So why don’t we take this little Pythagorean comma, these little six hertz, and spread it evenly over this? This should be 12 notes. We’ve got 12 notes here. Sorry. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, right? What if we take that little red part, which is the Pythagorean comma, and go one, you get a little bit, you get one twelfth, you get one twelfth, you get one twelfth, one twelfth, one twelfth… We spread it out. That way we’ve knocked this thing off, and we’ve created the circle. A perfect circle. An equal temperament scale. But the problem is…«

(inaudibile comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »No, really? The mean tones? You’re saying like the…«

(inaudibile comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »Exactly what we are going to get to. I don’t have it all here, but right. We knocked off and we played equal temperament. This is where Bach says: “And why did we play the equal temperament?” Because if you actually had a scale, which was pure, look at how uneven this thing is. Very good, we’re going to get to this in a minute. Look at all these numbers. If you want to modulate from key to key, if you want to go from…«

(modulates on keyboard)

»…to…«

(modulates on keyboard)

»...you need to have the same distances between all these. Otherwise the more you move up, the more you’re going to get out of tune.«

(...)

»If you want to come back to the original note, you play it, alright? One Note Samba now. One Note Samba, what are the lyrics?«

(participant is singing)

»Nice voice. Can you translate what you just sang. What did you just sing? In English. What do the lyrics mean?«

(another participant translates the lyrics without a microphone)

»How lovely.«

Participant: »Yeah, yeah, yeah.«

Danny Wang: »Other rules are soon to follow, but the note is still that note.«

Participant: »Yeah, erm.«

Danny Wang: »’Tadadadadadaaa’.«

Participant: »And who want all of the notes go to a lone end?«

Danny Wang: »Yeah, going to a lonely end.«

Participant: »It’s a metaphor with people, with relationship. If you want everybody, you will stay alone.«

Danny Wang: »But at the end you, there is also a thing, you come back to that one note. If you don’t know the whatever, then play the note, you know? The whole song is actually like a key. I mean, this is corny again, but it’s like I sort of found out what these keys are, and I hope you all take these keys home and just use them. Right, you were stating you come back to the one note, and what’s it? You seem to know, please! Hello.«

(asks another participant to explain the One Note Samba)

»The end part, something about.«

(inaudible comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »"A consequence of you," alright. ‘Tadadadadadadadadaaah’.«

Participant: »It’s hard to translate.«

Danny Wang: »Right, and then, so we come back to a note. We take that for faith. If we want to come back to the note we know at the end. Starting from one note then we have to make this equal temperament scale. Now it’s interesting, the mean term question, we realise there actually have been other scales, you know that. Name off three of them. There have been names of other scales besides equal temperament.«

Participant: »Ten tone even temper.«

(inaudible comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »Ten tone even temper. Oh, actually I’m thinking about twelve tone scales. Still twelve tones, ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’.«

Participant: »Pure.«

Danny Wang: »Pure, wonderful. Another?«

(inaudible comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »Whole tone scale is not a twelve tone equal temperament scale.«

(inaudible comment from participant)

»But it’s a scale, I might say, OK. Pure tone, pure minor, Werckmeister scale. Where’s some other ones? I’m blanking out, I can’t remember. Here is how to do it, alright? A mean tone is another one. We know now some things on a scale harmonise better than other notes with a scale. Like…«

(plays notes on keyboard)

»Alright? So if this fifth is so important in making melodies why should it get equal, you know… this is evil, OK? This is the evil Pythagorean comma which makes impure harmonies. What if we distribute this thing a little bit evenly? What if instead of making equal temperament, one, two, three, four, five, six and ‘tada’, we cut it unevenly, so the fifths maybe gets only a little, little bit of evil Pythagorean comma? And let’s say the seventh note, the…«

(plays notes on keyboard)

»Like that note is used much less in the scale, that gets a little more Pythagorean comma. We’ve got still the same six hertz here of stuff we have to get rid of, or we have to do something with it, but we put it in different places in the scale. That’s where we get these scales, like mean tone, exactly what she’s talking about. Mean tone, I think, actually there are different definitions of it. There are different ways to spread it. Like, I think, if you’re talking about a pure minor scale then you take this little bit and you just sort of… Oh, and there are three or four notes that you don’t use, they get all the evil stuff. And the good notes stay good the good notes stay pure. And the mean tone, I think, is distributed evenly, so each one gets proportionate to how much, it’s like the first one gets eight, the next one gets six, the next one gets four, something like this. OK? Now that we’ve established that where do we go? Do you want to take a little breathing break because I realise this is getting a bit academic and heavy, and it is not so much fun fun.«

RBMA: »It is, and I think there is a second lecture this afternoon too.«

Danny Wang: »It’s three o’clock now and I was supposed to finish at two?«

RBMA: »Yeah, and we have lunch now.«

Danny Wang: »OK, I didn’t want to keep everybody. Hold on. Let’s see how much we have to through, because after we do that we may not have so much. Alright. Now, actually since we’ve got through the discovery of scales, let’s move quickly here and then we can go move on to the theremin thing, and then we might already be almost done, OK? Harmony, we’re talking about whole tone scales, what if we divided the scale instead of in 12 notes, which seems to be what the human ear can most closely distinguish, into different numbers? Let’s say we made a scale with 14 notes. ‘Dadadadadadadadaa’. Which ones would be the ones that would give us the closest pure harmonies in music? We have a graph here from the same book.«

(...)

»Does anyone know who Wendy Carlos is? Wendy Carlos, OK? Does anyone to explain? What was her most famous record?«

Participant: »Switched On Bach.«

Danny Wang: »Switched On Bach, right, where she played one note at a time on a synthesizer. This is of course also the invention of the Moog synthesizer, and we get to this. She also became the composer of soundtracks for Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Tron, she also was a male to female transsexual, by the way. She discovered at some point that she wanted to be a woman. Oh, I have the records from her, how can I forget this? She actually calculated various scales, here we have them. I’m going the long way to explain why we should simply throw out our computers and try to play as human music as possible, but I think this is an interesting way to do it. You probably won’t hear this for the rest of your life. She did several records which involved microtonal tunings, and these are what you see on the graph. She’s experimenting with things which are Balinese. Slendro scales, Pelog scales and all sorts of pure mean tones, and she even explains here with her own voice what’s wrong with our equal temperament scale, and what you can hear. So let’s play this record. This is the voice of Wendy Carlos demonstrating the sounds that she made. Right, can we play this? And you can’t quite tell if it is a man or a woman, actually.«

(music:Wendy Carlos at the wrong speed)

»Oh, no. Her voice got high, but not that high.«

(music: Wendy Carlos)

»Listen to the dischord. There’s a very small difference. Do you want to listen to that again? There is less dischord at the second one, isn’t there? It’s not 'CHREGHCHR', it’s 'Geeeehh'. After realising the reason why we did go through with all this, of why the equal temperament music and most computer music and looped music was not enough for me, one day in the shop where I was working, a girl came in and started playing the theremin. Does anyone know what the theremin is? Most of you know what it is. For those of you who don’t, where is that DVD now? Hello? Ah, here it is. No, where is the original? Well, it’s not here, it’s alright, OK. The theremin is the first synthesizer, it was invented in 1917, it’s a box and you play it without touching it. The scientist who invented this thing was Leon Theremin, he also invented the radar. What is a radar? You’re going to a field, there’s a noise, there’s a 'Meeeeeaaaooo'. When you go and hear this there’s a blip on the map. He also invented the first color television. Let’s just play this thing, Autumn Leaves improv. I met this girl who just not only had perfect pitch, I mean, without playing keyboard she knows where the pitches are. She was 20-years old, she walked into the store and just started playing these boxes that we had in the store, not touching mind you. Have we got it? There she is.«

(music: Unknown - Autumn Leaves improv version)

»OK, that’s a little hint to that.«

RBMA: »The nightingale.«

Danny Wang: »The nightingale, I met her. And then there is this movie. I was hoping we can show this, it’s alright if you didn’t come to Beat Street last night, you’re forgiven, because only one person showed up. But please see this movie if you get a chance. It’s all about hip hop from ’84, but there was no gangster rap, there was nothing back then, this is music and dance in its purest form. And if all the people in this movie were white this will probably be like Gone With The Wind or Casablanca, but America, there you have it (laughter). But it’s such an incredible movie, and it’s full of hope and everything. Erm, this movie we could show later, it’s about the invention of the theremin, and can we go to my piece now? So I got this box, and I just went crazy for two years, and tried to learn to play it as she does. Here we go.«

(video: Danny Wang playing the Theremin )

»Alright.«

RBMA: »How do you play this?«

Danny Wang: »Erm, basically it’s, and it gets into DJing, too, what does a DJ do with the right hand?«

(inaudible comment from participant)

Danny Wang: »Right, wait, pitch. The other hand? Fader. One is doing the pitch the other is doing the volume. What does a guitar player do with the left hand? Pitch, volume. And this box works on the exactly same principle. You have pitch, distance, and I really wish we had a teremin here so I could probably demonstrate this, but you’ll have to imagine - 'all the people’ (sings John Lennon - Imagine / laughter) - and this is the volume, so as I get closer I’m just going to imagine this, OK? You have about three or four octaves here, just like on a keyboard you have ‘do re mi fa so la’. You actually, it’s just free, you know, there is no spacing. You’re just doing it by your ear and you’re finding it. It’s a lot like singing actually. And that’s what’s so fun about it, because suddenly you’re not restricted to this note, and if you’re going to play false notes you hear it. This is like a violin. Are there frets in a violin? No. You do it by ear. ‘Do re mi’, so you go, and if my hand pulls away I get volume, 'HooHoo…'«

(imitates theremin with his voice)

»For example. Or it might be 'La laa…'«

(imitates theremin with his voice)

»Alright? Like that. And suddenly this instrument made, everything made sense. And this girl taught me this, and we ended up doing demonstrations, that’s what you’re seeing is we’re doing demonstrations for Moog and everything together, and we travelled together with him. I don’t want to, I’m not showing off, but it was very nice. Bob Moog was the nicest person I ever met, and, erm, what was I thinking? Yeah, and she taught me, they taught me whatever instrument you find you just have to find the tone or note. You just find the root and you find everything that’s harmonic to it, and it doesn’t matter if you studied theory or not, because, as it says on the sheet, all this stuff seems like it’s like all academic or whatever, but theory is not a justification for pleasure in music. The pleasure in music is there already, you’re going to enjoy it whatever it is, whether you know the theory or not. Theory is only there to explain your pleasure and help you expand it. Everything that you can take home from this lecture and from learning all the musical theory you can, it’s just going to make it better and make it more pleasureable. So why not do it?«

(...)

»As I was getting the keyboard out I discovered that we have a fully trained proper blues guitar player here. Sorry to keep you waiting for so long. And we can kind of put into action and see this whole thing about one, four, five. So the most basic elements of a tonal scale being…«

(plays his keyboard)

»It’s in the middle.«

RBMA: »It should work.«

Danny Wang: »It should work. Are you going, you’re playing E, right? It’s actually really simple to see on the keyboard how blues from the '30s, '40s, '50s on, this became jazz, this became disco, this became everything. And it just comes down to three chords. It comes down to this basic one-five, one-four, and this is the way you play it. Here we go. Can you give us your root note? Alright, so.«

(looks for root note on keyboard)

»B, A. Oh, I know why, I’m transposed here, sorry. E, E, E major, alright? So what we’re going to go now through is, again this is, so to say, and it is obvious to a lot of you, how to compose. If I’m not going to get stuck in a loop and go 'Dandadadandadadan…' on and on, how do I build this thing? Blues based on twelve bars. We’ve got the E.«

(sings)

»Are we on the four? OK, sorry. That’s the note, 'Daaaaan', and then now we go up to the four, which is one, two, three, four, the A. Alright, so we go to the A. And then back to the E. 'Eeeeee'.«

(blues guitarist is playing)

»Alright, and what are we going to do next? Are we doing this?«

Blues guitarist: »Yeah.«

Danny Wang: »And then 4-4-1-1?«

Blues guitarist: »Yeah.«

Danny Wang: »That’s two fours. 'Bambambam', OK. E, sorry, A, A, leads to E’s and LSD. Alright, here we go.«

Blues guitarist: »It’s two A’s and two E’s.«

Danny Wang: » Two A’s and two E’s.«

(snapping his fingers)

»Alright, then we go up to 5-4-1-4 now, right? That crucial, that tension, that 'Oh, I want to go somewhere', oh, that’s E to F. F, right? «

Blues guitarist: »No, that’s a B.«

Danny Wang: »Oh, sorry.«

Blues guitarist: »B.«

Danny Wang: »B, sorry. 'B, B, B, B'. Alright, and then A.«

(Blues guitarist is playing)

Danny Wang: »Can we do the last one on the E again here? Just for its practice sake? Is that OK, is that natural?«

Blues guitarist: »Yeah, that’s what we do, A, E and then B.«

Danny Wang: »OK, so can you play through this so we can hear how it sounds.«

(Blues guitarist is playing)

Danny Wang: »A. 'Bombombombom …'. Nice, the 5 'Dudududududu … Dum'. Alright? The structure is very simple, and again this, so I hope, I know it’s perfectly obvious.«

(applause)

»Thank you so much!«