In Praise of Music Games: "Plays John Cassavetes 2" by Ekkehard Ehlers
Drumming Upstream #5
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! By the end of this letter I’ll only have 477 songs left to cover and then it’s goodbye Spotify. Last week I talked a lot of cash shit about how classical music, and by extension most other music, is done dirty by Spotify’s internal cataloging system. I ended the letter by promising to do more of the same through the lens of ambient music. However I am short on time this week and in a much better mood. So I’ll keep this one relatively brief and focus on the positives.
Side A
“Plays John Cassavetes 2”
By Ekkehard Ehlers
Plays
2002
Liked on September 28th, 2015
Of all the verbs that the English language could have settled on to describe how a musician’s does music, I am glad that it went with “play.” I play the drums. Bands play concerts. We complement musicians on their playing as often as we praise their performance. Those two words share some of the same meaning. Actors play roles in which they perform the behavior and actions of another person. Music involves some performance in the actorly sense. On the small scale, a musician might recall a past version of themselves when they perform old material. Or in a more totalizing way a musician might perform a whole new identity in order to entertain their audience. But god, doesn’t this all sound so tightly wound? Doesn’t “playing music” sound like so much more fun than “performing it?”
When I hear the verb play, I don’t think about actors and stages. I think about games. Athletic games, mind games, games for the screen and games for the tabletop, games collaborative and competitive. Music has something in common with all of these. Playing music with another person can be as casual as catch or as taxing as full court basketball. The rules for playing music range from the density of cricket to the looseness of Calvin ball. Anyone who has had to sight read a particularly difficult page of sheet music will understand the plight of the Dark Souls player even if they’ve never held an Xbox controller. Hell, reading sheet music is so much like playing a video game that entire game franchises1 have been built on simplified versions of sight reading. When people talk about “the music game” usually they’re referring to the cutthroat competition and strategic thinking that it takes to survive in the music industry, but for our purposes today I want to emphasize the lighter side of music as a game. We call it playing music because it is fun to do.
Musicians aren’t the only ones that play with music. If you’ll forgive some smart-ass-ness, anyone who presses the “play” button on their turntable is getting in on the action. Almost any activity can with the addition of rules and stakes become gamified. Listening to music is no different. My friend Daniel Müller and I used to play a game with our iPods where we’d put our libraries on shuffle, look away from the screen, and see who could guess the artist first. Every ten tracks we’d switch iPods and repeat. I’d usually get my ass whooped. We’d both score about even guessing on my collection, but once we switched over to his collection of obscure folk metal I was toast. One year I got so fed up with losing that before I took the bus up to Massachusetts I loaded up my iPod with all sorts of entry level hipster garbage that I knew he wouldn’t recognize. I emerged victorious at the cost of the game itself.
Despite retiring with a losing record, all of those rounds of guessing had sharpened my ears to pick up clues and fire off neurons of associations in my brain any time I listened to music. Years later, when another friend of mine out of the blue quizzed me to identify the sample that German ambient composer Ekkehard Ehlers looped to create his song “Plays John Cassavetes 2” I correctly sussed out the answer within a minute or two. Scroll back up to the Youtube embed up above these paragraphs and press play. Can you guess where this loop comes from? If you can, how long did it take you?
If you can’t figure it out, or if you already knew the answer, scroll on down to the video below this paragraph.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
“Plays John Cassavetes 2” is made from a six second long excerpt from “Good Night” by The Beatles2. “Good Night” is the last song on the fourth and final side of The Beatles, better known as The White Album. It was written by John Lennon but sung by Ringo Starr, whose drumming we will address at a later date. The clip of “Good Night” that Ehlers pulled does not include Starr’s voice or the playing of any Beatle, only an orchestra of session musicians as conducted by producer George Martin. It’s probably one of the least Beatles-y sounding chunks of the entire album, especially without the context of the hour and a half of very Beatles-y music that precedes it. Instead, the loop sounds like it could come from a number of sources, a movie score, a piece of classical music, a crooner ballad, etc, an impression that Ehlers amplifies by starting the loop out of sync with the phrasing of the original melody.
When my friend tried to stump me with “Plays John Cassavetes 2” he had no way of knowing that “Good Night” once had the privilege of being the most played Beatles tune on my iTunes. I’m not going to pretend like that isn’t weird as hell. “Good Night” is an oddity, a corny-on-purpose lullaby tacked on to the end of a 30 song double album. It probably wouldn’t crack the top 20 of a draft of the best songs on The White Album, let alone The Beatles discography as a whole. But for a stretch of time in college I found myself listening to it almost daily. Something about the timbre of the strings and their swooping, old Hollywood arrangement reminded me of Shirō Sagisu’s score for Neon Genesis Evangelion, a TV show that we all know I have a lot of thoughts about.
This anachronistic association has imported a lot of sinister intent into “Good Night”. One of Evangelion’s go-to moves is to impose schmaltzy, expensively-pretty sounding music against absolutely nightmarish images. Watching The End Of Evangelion made it hard for me to hear Bach’s “Air on G String” without thinking of a teenage girl getting eaten alive and turned the sound of 70s soft rock into the trumpets of armageddon. “Good Night” doesn’t ever feel like a lullaby to me, unless the sleep that Starr wishes upon the world in his proto-ASMR whisper at the end of the track is of an eternal variety.
It is to Ehlers’ credit that none of this second hand horror makes its way into “Plays John Cassavetes 2”. The track is part of a series of tributes to four of Ehlers’ artistic idols. Along with filmmaker John Cassavetes, the pieces on Plays nod to composer Cornelius Cardew, novelist Hubert Fichte, and the musicians Albert Ayler and Robert Johnson. Much of the collection is hard to get a good read on. Though each of the named figures that Ehlers is “playing” was long dead by time of Plays release, none of the music on the compilation feels mournful or reverent. The connections between the tracks and their namesakes seem largely conceptual rather than emotional, which I imagine comes across as cold to most listeners. The one exception is “Plays Cassavetes 2”. The track has by far the most plays on Spotify of any of Ehlers output, and every contemporary review of Plays that I’ve read singles it out as a high point. It isn’t hard to hear why. Ehlers doesn’t just let the loop play untouched. Parts of the loop to slide out of sync with each other, blurring the melody into new shapes. Slowly the lowest notes of the string arrangement gain in volume and then recede again. Eventually any recognizable melodies from “Good Night” dissolve into tonal mist, with the sound of the tape turning over the only evidence of the loop ever existing in the first place.
Sampling is its own kind of play. Instead of treating a recording as immutable and sacrosanct, the sampler thinks of a record or tape as a toy with its own ludic potential. Sampling can be lighthearted and irreverent. It can be loud and bombastic, like a child assembling their action figures for a mock action film finale. It can be achingly sentimental. The options aren’t infinite, but they might as well be. Ehlers might have been thinking of Cassavetes, but in practice he is playing with The Beatles. When I correctly guessed the song’s source material I found the answer funny. Turning a Ringo song into an art object is funny. Treating “Good Night” with the same techniques that The Beatles themselves were futzing around with one track earlier on The White Album is a prank on pop music history. Liking “Plays John Cassavetes 2” gave me a short cut to try the same game with other Beatles fans. It has hung in my Liked playlist like a pennant ever since. Over the years the butt of the joke has faded from view, leaving behind the residue of a good time and a game well played.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
As long as we’ve got competition on the mind, let’s take a look at how “Plays John Cassavetes 2” compares to the rest of my Liked songs. So far Bruce Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean” has held off all comers to remain at the top of the leaderboard since I started the project. Last week I made the case for “Bobby Jean” against the upstart “Daphnis et Chloé Suite No.2” by Maurice Ravel on the basis of its superior economy. Springsteen gets a lot of feeling out of a small amount of music, but most of that feeling comes from his lyrics. Ehlers made ten minutes of music out of six seconds of material. If music were math he’d win on his efficiency alone. But “Plays Cassavetes 2” also passes the ear test. As much as the lyrics of “Bobby Jean” mean to me, I prefer the open ended suggestion that Ehlers’ offers on this track. “Plays Cassavetes 2” leaves a lot of room for its listener to live in, and what you fill that room with is up to you.
We have a new champion, folks.
“Plays John Cassavetes 2” by Ekkehard Ehlers
I played Rock Band once, when I was in high school. Some of my non-musician friends goaded me into giving Iron Maiden’s “Run To The Hills” a go. I did alright at first, but I quickly ran into trouble when I tried to play the game’s mock drum kit like an actual kit instead of a game controller. I’m not going to speculate whether rhythm games can help you learn an instrument, but in my experience the reverse is emphatically not the case. For more on Iron Maiden see DU#21.
The Beatles will eventually appear in Drumming Upstream.