The honey bee drones in C (C♮). Roll over the notehead below. Sometimes, in honor of his namesake, he’ll drone down to a B (B♮). Ya know, like “B/Bee/Be natural”? Does anyone take reality seriously when this kind of thing exists?
Mnemonic Device: Sharp Bees Buzz a B Sharp!
The tone C might just be the most popular tone in America next to the industrial B hum. It’s possible that bees inspired the hum of our machines. C Major is an incredibly popular key. It is the “white keys” on a piano. It is a standard key for musical toys and little keyboards. Wesminster Quarters, the bellsong, is often in the key of C. And for Jupiter’s sake, Bees buzz it all day long!
Please be kind to your apian friends, by letting them be!
Hey Kids! It’s the Teapot Song. Who is a little Teapot? I’m a little Teapot. For some reason, this song has been in Los Doggies’ head for the past few days. Couldn’t remember some of the lyrics though. Turns out, there’s a lost second verse.
Second verse:
I’m a very special teapot,
Yes, it’s true,
Here’s an example of what I can do,
I can turn my handle into a spout,
Tip me over and pour me out!
The teapot goes from self-conscious to swaggering in just two little verses. Her awakening in the first verse to the heating and pouring of her body, soon gives way to outright bravura in the second verse, even going so far as to proclaim herself “special”. For Chrissake, you’re just a little teapot.
The song was originally written by George Harry Sanders and Clarence Kelley in 1939 in order to give their very young dance students something to sing and dance to. It became enormously popular in America and overseas. It’s easy to see why:
That shit is awesome. Look at them noteheads. No you can’t roll over them. But they’re beautiful. No accidentals. Just down-beat all the way. Eighth notes and quarter notes; quavers and crotchets. Simple folk melodies and three-chord songs will never get boring. Ever.
Why even Jeopardy! uses the 4th phrase as its bumper. How many sudden quizical epiphanies has this little melody caused?
I’d like to invite Sugar Ray to play a round of musical Jeopardy, hosted by me, your host: George Alexander Trebek!
Just like Jeopardy!, Trebek! is almost always followed by an! exclamation! point!
The Clock Song plays everywhere all the time. It is the most popular rhythm in the world. Each tick and tock is a quarter beat, or crochet, worth a second.
The human heart also beats at around 60 beats/per/minute, just like clockwork. Moderate Rock Tempo of 120 bpm (the oft-used tempo in Pop Music) is the cut-time of clocks and hearts. None of these things are coincidences. Reality is a setup. Don’t believe it!
We live in a Civilized Song of clock beats and electric drones, on top of which, human and non-human animals breathe out melodies in and out of time.
People actually get married to this chord. At least in the Anglosphere they do. It’s from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”
After a monotonal ceremony of gifts, vows, and proclamation, this dissonant chord kicks in on pipe organ. It’s an A minor 6th, which has the satanic interval between the F# and C known as a tritone. Let’s give this matrimonial tritone a nice portmanteau name. Something like…Matritoney (mā’trə-tō’nē)?
How do corporations rule the world when corporations rule the world? Why, with simple melodies played on idiophones like the hand chimes pictured left.
Germans call them “ohrwurm,” meaning earworm. A catchy song crawls inside our ever-open ears like a musical parasite and lays egg-songs in our brains.
There is no more insidious melody on Earth than the dreaded NBC chimes.
The NBC chimes are derived from the popular bell-song Westminster Quarters. It consists of three notes – the Fifth (G), the Third (E), and the One or Root (C). The door bell has these last two notes, which form the interval of a Major Third.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the ABC melody has 4 notes. Whereas the NBC chimes have a distinctly Major flavor, the ABC melody is Minor all the way.
This modern take sounds like sonar pings. Disney is apparently broadcasting from a submarine.
I don’t know which melody is more nefarious—the child-like chimes of the Major NBC motif, or the slick Minor turnaround of the ABC pings? I’m not even going to get into the FOX fanfare, because let’s face it: TV sucks, and their cute major-minor melodies can go to hell.
HEY, aren’t there any birds to transcribe? Or any other new animals to make Yankovician parodies of?
Friends, these corporate melodies are but a passing footnote in the Los Doggies Electric Encyclopedia.
The most famous chord in all of rock ‘n’ roll is the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night” by The Beatles.
If the Galaxy runs anything like in Close Encounters, then the above chord will function diplomatically. I’m sure it already has, here on Earth.
If Lewis Carrol were to develop a portmanteau word for this chord, it would be a superduperimposition of “brr’ling”, “brr’lang”, and “cha-aa-a-aa-a-nng”.
This type of chord is known as a Thunderchord for obvious reasons: it splits the heavens in halves.
It takes all of the Beatles and their producer to play this one chord. Paul is hitting a high D on his Hofner bass, George is playing an F9 chord on his 12-string Rickenbacker, as is John on his acoustic Gibson. Meanwhile, George Martin is striking a G power-chord thang on his Grand Piano, and Ringo taps a single snare. There is much dispute over the true nature of this chord, and there seem to be at least 20 different possibilities. For more interpretations, read this article.
However, George stated in an online chat, that he definitely played an F9 (the top of the chord). He also picks this chord during the outro.
This is one of them 60’s style lickety-split fade-outs. You can hear this on a lot of Beatles’ tunes (See “Good Day Sunshine”).
You can clearly hear the D bass note dominating the “A Hard Day’s Chord”, making the most sensible interpretation some form of the D Dominant chord. I prefer to call it a “D Minor 7th Suspended 4th”, though really it just sounds like the entire G Mixolydian scale (GABCDEF) played at once, excluding the B. “A Hard Day’s Night” is in the key of G Mixolydian.
The 7 frequencies of the G Mixolydian scale when converted into light, correspond to the 7 colors. A good mnemonic to remember this photosonic relationship is “GAB C. DEF, meet ROY G. BIV”.
Unfortunately, the Goldie Hawn version misses a golden opportunity to jazz the shit out of this thunderchord. Instead, it begins with a crummy ol’ bass triplet.
The Great Horned Owl has a semitonal hoot. The male and female display musical dimorphism in their hooty duets. Male hooters usually end up somewhere around the human note E, and female hooters sing something like an A. Though there is much tonal variation in owl pairs, female owls are about a fourth above males. Imagine sitting around a campfire in an owl-laden wood with nothing but an acoustic guitar. One could play an E Major chord with the male owl’s melody, and play an A Major Chord with the female’s. Like so:
Actually, it’s almost as though the owls are playing a bass line underneath the guitar chords. The rhythm of their song is similar to “SOS” in Morse Code which goes “dit-dit-dit, dah, dah, dah, dit-dit-dit”.
Great Horned Owls make a host of other sounds besides hoots. They say “Wah! Wah! Ah! Ahh! Ark!” and the owlets whistle. Here is a page of their repertoire.
This site was constructed with Flash widgets which looked really cool, but then Adobe killed Flash and now parts of this page don't work. Nevertheless, Zombie Los Doggies Dot Com continues to walk the Earth.
RSS
Subscribe to our RSS feed and get 1-2 posts a week about life and music.
