- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
on joanna newsom, upcoming shows, and new music
July into August has been a bit of whirlwind shows, back injuries, and furtive obsessions with the lego brickage that is deciphering how to play Joanna Newsom's harp parts. This entire month's newsletter is just a word spew of announcements + some thoughts related to joanna newsom: mostly because I've been muttering to myself in my basement about her for like the past two months and figured I should exorcise these thoughts before I'm just cuckoo for coco puffs. If that's not your thing no worries! I'll be back to harpness in September having shorn my infodump.
NEW MUSIC - some lenient line (live)
Melancholic viola lines lilt betwixt harpy sparkles in this live recording taken from Arie Verheul van de Ven and I's 24-25 Tranzac residency. It might just be a lil taste of whats's to come from us... Released as part of Odd Neighbour's Odds + Ends 2 compilation cassette featuring nine of our neighbours across Ontario & beyond. (which btw also check out Bicyclops' entry Violet in this veritable saloon of fab glitchy degenerates).
UPCOMING SHOWS (last ones til likely 2026)
The Stacks: First Impressions Arrayspace
Friday, August 22 at 8pm
$30 General, $25 Students & Arts Workers
I'll be premiering composer and violist Isaac Page's newest work Passage of a Smile for harp, flute, double bass, and viola. You'll also enjoy the shimmering gem that is the Debussy Flute, Harp, and Viola Concerto performed by my friend Alanna Elison!
Solitary Shrew
Tranzac Club, Southern Cross
Tuesday, August 25 at 7pm
PWYC
Haven't quite decided what kind of set I'll be doing at Solitary Shrew. I know I've been itching to test out new material, and I've also been itching to lean into a heavier electric harp set with denser tape sample mashing.
This'll be my last show for awhile, as I've been aching for some time to sort new material.
PAUSING TO FANGIRL
a skippable intro to Joanna Newsom if you're in the know already
Joanna's music has soundtracked my most searching, straining minutes (and the more fellow Newsomers I run into in the wild, the more it seems that's the red thread connecting us all). No one else have I known to digress in what it means to be a human around other humans seeing out your own eyes quite so plainly. Her way of writing in its intense scenes, symbols, narrative, et al to me is as word's sounds are to Symbolism: I get less caught up in the writer's intent than I am in the impression of it and my own feelings toward it. That's not to say stop paying attention to the lyrics - I'm not advocating that. Rather, sometimes I like sticking with an impression of something rather than trying to decipher who/what/why exactly she wrote these songs about.
Anyways, if you haven't listened to her before, I highly recommend Milk-Eyed Mender if you want to start with smaller tidbits, and leaning into Have One on Me when you're reading for the sparkling theatrical scenes. Album order is always preferred of course.
Deeper Dives: the Kora's influence on Joanna's harp composition
One cannot talk about Joanna Newsom without talking about the influence of Appalachian music on her freak folk era and the Kora on why she plays so many polyphonic polyrhythms.
So, let's get technical.
In Western European Classical Harp music, we generally tend to differentiate between bass clef in left hand, and treble in our right.
This is due in part to the instrument's construction and that it sits on our right shoulder - making the lowest part of the bass clef unreachable to our right hand. This also means that melodies tend to be played in the right hand, and accompaniment in the bass. (listen to Sophia Dussek's Sonato for the Harp in C major for instance)
The West African Kora, historically played in Mali, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Senegal, has no such limitation - right and left hand have equal access to a similar range of notes, and the two sets of strings are placed side by side. This equal access might also be why Kora pieces are polyphonic - bass, accompaniment, and melody intermix equally within musical patterns.
While Kora's are typically tuned according to player preference, there are some commonly utilized heptatonic scales as pictured below.
If you laid out the Kora's range using the F Silaba tuning on a piano, you can see how interspersed your options are in both hands, and that it's not strictly, low notes left, high notes right.
Additionally when it comes to tendencies, Kora players play polyphonically - interspersing the melody, bass, and accompaniment simultaneously. Further detail on this would triple the length of my already long newsletter so I invite you to read a better breakdown of the Kora's tendencies here if you want more info on the polyphonic aspect.
Compared to the pedal harp, this is what makes the Kora's voicing unique, and my assumption here is that it's part in due to the instrument's construction and that both right and left hand have equal-ish ranges at their fingertips.
Anyways, you can directly see how this idea of polyrhythmic hand cohesion plays out in Joanna Newsom's Bridges and Balloons. Both hands work together voicing the Gb chord with no weight on melody vs. accompaniment placed on right over left hand. Listen to the intro and see how this is voiced in the first 8 measures below. Both hands work as a unit voicing the Gb + Eb chords.
To further emphasize a typical chord voicing versus what Joanna does, take a peek at Measure 1 below, which gives you the G chord in root position ending the octave above at G-B-D-G and typically played solely in left hand. Measure 2 showcases how Joanna voices that same chord in Measure 1 of Bridges and Balloons, splitting it between left and right hands.
It's this characteristic voicing within Joanna's writing that gives it that unique lilt - leaning into that Kora-esque polyrhythmic cohesiveness between left/right hand (and as she states, directly inspired by it). You can actually hear a few similarities in patterns between Bridges and Balloons and the Kora piece played below by Sibo Bangoura. Listen to ~30 seconds of each and compare!
You see this style of accompaniment across her discography, and it's very her. If I had to create a new song in the style of Joanna Newsom, this would be an accompaniment technique I would use (and abuse), similar to Sprout and the Bean.
Later on in Cosmia, see how the right + left hands interweave with the vocal line - leaning into that sense of polyphonic voicing characteristic of the Kora where the melody is interwoven between bass and accompaniment patterns.
A last example, and one of my personal favorites, comes from Sawdust & Diamonds. Bass in left hand, accompaniment in right, melody in voice, all interwoven where you don't necessarily hear the parts as separate, but instead as a whole.
All this to say, Newsom's synthesized a style of harp writing that translates the Kora's polyphonic polyrhythms onto the pedal harp. It's one of a few singularly defining influences that gives her harp voicing its unique style - and a distinct sense of forward momentum in parts.
I could go on, but I digress (and hopefully this doesn't come out as complete gobledygook). If you ever wanna nerd out on Joanna Newsom you know where I'm at.
RECCOMENDATIONS:
Early DIY doc on Joanna Newsom in the Milk-Eyed Mender era.
Sandy Denny's Who Knows Where The Time Goes
if you're in Toronto, you need to catch the Carolina Lopez/Stacks show on September 8. Vibe is Again.
Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegalese Kora player Seckou Keita's masterful exploration in both their album Clychau Dibon and this live performance.
okay ta-ta til next month, where this email will be much shorter, and thanks for reading! <3 grace