@FrodoPiano is a 12-year-old composer who grew up listening to lots of Phish, thanks to parents who are fans. That exposure inspired an arrangement of 22 Phish songs (plus a reprise) in a mammoth 269-measure medley, his 45th posted score. You can hear and watch the arrangement here (or visit the host page to read his introduction), followed by a short Q&A with the prolific songsmith.

Phish Medley by FrodoPiano

How many Phish shows have you seen, and what was the first?

I have seen Phish some six times, and I have seen Trey with an orchestra twice, at the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. My first concert was on November 1, 2009. When I was younger, I listened to Rift a lot, as my dad had a copy that he kept in the car, so you could almost say I “grew up with it,” which might be why I am a bit biased toward it. ;)

What’s your favorite Phish song, and why?

I don’t want to sound cliche, but my favorite has to be "Divided Sky". It has so many movements, with so many great themes, and I love all of them. (It was also apparently the song my mother wanted to hear instantly after I was born, so maybe that means something …) My favorite albums, though, are Junta and Rift.

How long have you been composing, and why do you enjoy it?

Well, first of all, I’d like to make clear that I certainly did not compose this, and all writing credits go to the members of Phish, respectively. However, I do compose regularly, and I have been for … say … 4-5 years now. I really like it because there are so many possibilities, and so many different concepts and ideas to explore. For example, I just learned about polyrhythms, so I just did an “experiment” to see how they worked within a piece, and that turned into my 6th prelude! I actually compose more than I arrange, and I’m now working on a piece called "Sinfonia Pangaea", one called "Song of Life", and the score for a friend’s game, of which the opening piece is called "Solitaire."

You’ve also written a seven-movement suite, somewhat inspired perhaps by Holst’s “The Planets.” Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, somewhat going off the idea of The Planets (which I love, and have seen in concert), and The Four Seasons, I decided to write a suite entitled The Days of the Week. At first, I realized that the seven days could correspond with the seven musical modes (Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aiolian, Phrygian, and Locrian), but I decided against it, both to give myself more compositional freedom, and to prevent writing in Locrian, what with “resolving” to a diminished chord being … difficult. If you want to check that out, it’s here, and my favorite movements are "Wednesday" and "Friday."

What role has music education played in your life?

Music has, among other things, given me something to think about. There are so many different concepts in theory, and they’re so thought-provoking that you could spend ages just thinking about them. Also, if I’m ever stressed, I can just start snapping out a cool rhythm (or polyrhythm), or come up with a new theme or concept for a piece. It’s also just a lot of fun! Composing, for me, is a great outlet for creativity, because there are always new … possibilities, and new ideas that can be made reality through composing. I have also played piano for almost 6 years, and I just started playing the oboe.

Why did you arrange for this particular dectet, and for what other ensembles have you arranged or composed?

To be honest, I don’t completely know. I guess I just wanted woodwinds, and I chose some, and came out with this double wind quintet (with handclaps, because no performance of "Stash" is complete without handclaps). The bassoons are extremely versatile, and, in this case, work great as Mike’s part, throughout the medley. Other than that, different instruments get the melody throughout the medley, sometimes multiple kinds of instruments, sometimes just one. However, whenever an instrument gets a melody, both of the players of that instrument get the same part. In fact, only in certain harmonic cases do the two players of each instrument get a different part than their “counterpart.” Some instances of this are "Divided Sky," "Rift," "The Lizards," etc. Other ensembles I have arranged for include a piano with a violin and a cello, a piano with two violins, a piano duet, and solo piano. I have composed for many ensembles, including: solo piano; piano four hands (that’s four hands on one piano); violin and orchestra; oboe and bassoon; solo oboe; brass sextet; string quartet; guitars and an accordion; along with other small ensembles.

What songs did you not include, and why?

Well, that’s a long (and, in some cases, unfortunate) list, but there are good reasons behind most choices. The most common reason, of course, is that I can’t include every Phish song - that would take hours of music. Another reason is that some songs didn’t really … fit anywhere very well, and by the time I was wrapping the medley up, they just weren’t there. The third reason is something some of you may have noticed already - there’s no percussion! This was, frankly, an odd choice on my part, but I prefer, in general, composing with very little percussion, which typically doesn’t pose much of a problem. Now, for an arrangement of Phish songs, this gets a bit tricky, and on some songs, typically the “rock-ier” songs, this got a bit too tricky, so I left some out. Now for some reason, while I was arranging the medley, I completely forgot about "Fee," which would have worked, and now I’m really mad at myself.

What other adjustments did you have to make without a drummer?

Let’s face it - Fishman is amazing, and none of the songs sounded as good without him. But, both by choosing (mostly) more melodic songs and by laying down a clear rhythm with the bassoons, it wasn’t too hard to get a beat in there. As for the handclaps, you can’t do "Stash" without handclaps, and I decided to use them in "Mound" too. On the topic of "Mound," it provided a new problem in terms of rhythm, because of its polyrhythmic intro, which happened to be all I used. It’s just a simple 3:4 polyrhythm, but without a percussion section to lay down a beat, I had trouble keeping it sounding like a polyrhythm, and not just a time change. "First Tube" also has a polyrhythm, but that one wasn’t as hard to lay down.

You mention choosing more melodic songs. What can you say about what that excludes - songs you’d otherwise like to arrange, how you’d describe them, and where Phish’s arrangements lean, if anywhere?

This excludes, as I said, the “rock-ier” songs, meaning the songs that are more rock-and-roll(-ish), or more Fishman-heavy. This might include "Chalk Dust Torture," "Run Like an Antelope," "Weekapaug Groove," (dare I say) "Meatstick," etc., which unfortunately are some of Phish’s greatest songs, but would not be a good use of precious time in this arrangement, because they wouldn’t sound nearly as good with only woodwinds. Some of these might be fun to arrange if I added, maybe, some percussion/brass, and maybe strings or keyboards for fun.

Are there any Phish songs you would NOT want to arrange, or that you think are beyond re-arrangement, either by a woodwind dectet or otherwise?

Well, that’s a difficult question, but the one answer that comes to me is "Also Sprach Zarathustra." This is simply because it was arranged to be a Phish song, so to re-arrange it would be silly.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I know, this MIDI patch sounds awful, but hey, if one of you knows a woodwind dectet who’d like to play this, go ahead! (Just credit me.) :)

Shouldn’t you be playing with a ball or getting a job instead of poking a keyboard?

No.

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Welcome to the 199th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Answer: Congrats to @yunkfunk for nailing this one within an hour of my posting it, collecting his fifth win by correctly identifying the outro to Horn from 6/20/97. Have a safe and happy holiday this week, and we'll be back next week with our 200th MJM! It'll be an MJM extravaganza, with extra difficulty and extra prizes. Stay tuned...

Welcome to the 198th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday. The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Quick note: One of my first orders of business as MJM host was to add MJM achievement badges for all past winners. Due to the MJM being started on the old Tumblr page (pre standard .net usernames), username changes since winning, and spelling mistakes, I may not have correctly added all past winners' badges. If you've won but don't see the badge in your achievements, please PM me with the MJM you won (see results below).

Update: No hint needed this week.

Answer: Congrats to our sixth seven-time MJM winner, @mcgrupp81, who correctly identified this week's MJM as Mike's Song from 4/24/92 at the Roseland Theater in Portland, OR. With his seventh win, he joins @RabeldyNugs, @pauly, @ghostboogie, @bl002e, and @PersnicketyJim as MJM emeriti, and is henceforth prohibited from participating in the MJM as an active competitor. With 100+ codes to give away and six Hall-of-Famers on the shelf (and yours truly stuck at six wins on this side of the fence), the competition for free Phish downloads is suddenly wide open. Maybe the blog might stand a chance now... See you next week!

I ran some questions by Wally Holland, the author of “A Live One,” published by Bloomsbury as part of its 33⅓ book series. “A Live One” is a book about A Live One (“ALO”), Phish’s first official live album, as well as Phish’s music and fans. What you may not know about ALO is that online Phish fans had some input into what the band ultimately decided to release on the album. On February 5, 1995, Shelly Culbertson posted this invitation to Rec.Music.Phish:

“...I just had a long phone conversation with Trey. ... he'd like to ask the net to do him a favor...

So, the favor is this: if you have the time to do it, please consider constructing the Phish double live CD that you would like to hear. Please bear in mind that this CD should be interesting to people who have never heard Phish before, as well as those who have been listening to them for years. Please remember to consider that versions of songs from lesser-known shows may be as good as, or better than, versions of the same songs from well-known shows such as Halloween and NYE.

The format is two 70-minute CDs ("CD1" and "CD2"). Consider the transitions between songs, and the pace and dramatic flow of the order in which the songs occur on each CD. ... We're not saying that the net's compilation will become the live CD, by any means; but the band will listen to it with open ears, and if they like it, they will seriously consider the suggestions it makes. –Shelly”

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I have been reading Wally’s musings on Phish and music and other topics since the 1990s, and to this day I’m still in disbelief that the band released the Bangor Tweezer on ALO. I am not a disinterested spectator. –charlie)

CD: What in particular about Phish inspired --and continued to motivate-- you in writing this book?

WH: Love, right?

I've been obsessed with different music before: Herbie Hancock, Ornette and his descendants, tango music (and dance), electric Miles, film scores, Kid A, Andrew Bird, Achtung Baby, They Might Be Giants. I've gone through periods where I couldn't live without particular musicians -- John Coltrane especially, and a period where I listened to almost nothing but the Dead.

But I've only ever loved a small number of musicians. What I feel for Phish, beyond what I feel about their music, I can only call love.

That's half of it. But then because the center of our shared fandom, the music itself, is so particular -- the improvisatory method so finicky, the compositional voice so admirably catholic, the humour (still) so absurd, the band/audience connection so deep, the worldview so specific yet so open and welcoming -- I still find writing about Phish a compelling challenge. There's this specific thing they do that no one else has ever done in quite the same way, and even now they're exploring new areas of that art! That's so rare. I keep wanting to write something that's equal to the power of their best music.

Oh! Also the thought of making MOUNTAINS OF MONEY.

Did you learn anything new about Phish's music, or even your own musical perspectives, in writing “A Live One”?

WH: They were even better in the mid-90s than I remembered -- and I had some pretty great memories.

The project was a huge learning experience -- that's one reason I took it on. As personal as it necessarily is, there's a lot less of ME and MY story in there than there might have been.

I learned a bunch about the roots of the band, their inspirations. Only recently have I begun to appreciate how Weird (and disreputable!) some of Phish's early influences were. I'd barely heard any Beefheart before starting my research listening for the book, for instance, and didn't realize how much his painstakingly detailed private visionary weirdness anticipated Trey's and Phish's, though Trey was savvy and sociable enough to build a democratic band, which cuts against his privatizing impulses.

I learned a lot about punk and postpunk, in passing. I don't enjoy punk rock, but what I think of as the postpunk 'fusion' moment generated a ton of really interesting music. Trey's beloved Talking Heads, for one thing...

I realized that there's a (short) book to be written about the mid-80s Burlington music/arts scene and its relationship to other countercultures; I'm definitely not the person to write it, of course.

The biggest realization might be this: the music is way bigger, truer, more beautiful, than anything I have to say about it. You can see how that'd be a blow to a writer's ego, especially one with messianic pretensions. But maybe it's the start of a new, deeper understanding. I hope so.

Would you have written any sections of the book differently now that you've had time to reflect on the process after publishing?

WH: Most of it (sigh) -- but I can't trust my assessment of the book at this moment. I've been reading a lot of Greil Marcus lately, finally, and his approach to rock writing, in which every aesthetic gesture (however small) is understood as a weighty exchange in an ongoing Great American Mythic Conversation, is dangerously contagious, though wearying in large doses. It makes me want to go back to chapter 2, the long forerunners/contexts chapter that sets the stage for everything else in the book, and try to weave it together into something more continuous. Closer to the version in my head.

I'd definitely spend more time fine-tuning the chapter about 'whiteness.' (There is indeed a chapter about 'whiteness.' It's that kind of book. Why bite off only as much as you can chew, after all?) At the moment it veers a little too quickly to a defense of Phish's 'syncretism,' as opposed to 'appropriation,' and I'd wanna take more time before doing so -- think more about the roots of Phish's cultural politics. Well: I blinked.

Who are your favorite authors?

WH: John Crowley, Russell Hoban: fantasists at home with the heightened abstractions of myth-history and the most painfully intimate domestic portraiture -- and Crowley (who wrote Little, Big, an all-time great portrait of lifelong married love) works on a scale approaching that of...

...Thomas Pynchon: the best we've got, isn't he? He commands more registers, and engages with his material at more scales, than any other writer I know. Byron the Bulb? Jessica and Roger at the church? Oedipa putting on all those clothes in the hotel room? 'They fly toward grace'?! He can do everything, and is willing to try.

Douglas Hofstadter, Kenneth Hite: idiosyncratic practitioners of a kind of speculative nonfiction who demonstrate (in maximally different registers and domains) how to turn private obsessions into tools for playful creative thinking. Hofstadter is a CS/cogsci guy; Hite writes roleplaying games.

James Merrill, E.E. Cummings, Pablo Neruda: Merrill's Sandover is a 600-page visionary poem about talking to W.H. Auden and a host of angels through a ouija board. Harrowing, melancholy, regally ironic -- and incidentally a moving portrait of James and David's long marriage (in all but name). Cummings wrote maybe the funniest erotica I know -- and he was more concise than Christgau, for Christ's sake. Neruda's introduction to his 100 Sonnets is one of those perfect things; the rest of the book has seemingly limitless freedom-within-formalism that I hear in Piazzolla.

Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, P.G. Wodehouse: two angry sages and an elf.

Christopher Hitchens: My favourite pugilist. His dialectical arguments on behalf of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq -- from first principles which his colleagues at (e.g.) The Nation theoretically shared -- are still unsettling, even now. A signed copy of his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, which a fan of my old blog(!!) once sent me unprompted, is one of my prize possessions. And it's a beautiful, stirring book about thinking freely and enjoying life.

David Milch: One of my heroes. He has Hitchens's encyclopedic recall, Pynchon's ear for voices, Joss Whedon's command of dialogic rhythm, and Rumi's joyful spirit -- not to mention an improvisatory spirit worthy of, lemmeseehere, Trey Anastasio himself. Deadwood's dialogue is the best ever written for TV, which wouldn't matter if its characters weren't fully realized human beings. Sidebar: his Idea of the Writer lectures are available online, and -- forgive my evangelical zeal -- they can change your life.

All men, I know, on this list at least: one of my shortcomings.

Are you (considering) writing more books about Phish?

WH: Two's enough, I think! Even my 5-year-old son makes fun of 'daddy's Phish books.' Though Phish'll make a cameo in what I think/hope is my next project, which builds on chapter 2 of the 33-1/3 book. It's not primarily about music.

If you could ask a band member any question, who and what?

WH: I'd want to talk to them all about their practice regimen, how that's changed over the years; and about their understanding of changes in the band's music in the late 90s and early 21C. And I have a lot of questions for Page about how he understands his role in the band, since he's the one whose expertise is least obvious.

Will you be at any of the MSG shows?

WH: Doubtful. A nice thought, anyhow.

Thank you for your time, Wally! For more information about the 33⅓ book series, please visit Wikipedia. And to order Wally’s A Live One, please visit Amazon.

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Welcome to the 197th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday. I'd like to thank @bl002e for all his hard work the past few years, attempting to stump us with some great jams across Phish's history. But he's moved on to bigger and better things now and has handed me the reins, so I'll be your new MJM host. I hope my work on the Jam Charts will help me stump you all -- I'm excited to start, and I won't let you guys down. That's right folks, MJM 3.0 is about to begin!

The winner will receive an MP3 download courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery jam clip. Though I don't envision doing this anytime soon, given we're approaching MJM #200, I am reserving the right to select different portions of jams that have previously appeared in the MJM. Each person gets one guess per day, with the second “day” starting after I post the hint. A hint will be posted on Tuesday if necessary, with the answer to follow on Wednesday. Good luck!

Tuesday update: No hint needed this week...

Answer: Congratulations and welcome to first-time winner and first-time poster, @trich12345, who came out of the woodwork and correctly guessed 9/17/99 "Viola Lee Blues" from Shoreline. Maybe he too figured that for my first MJM, I should choose a jam from my first show. Next week's MJM won't be so straightforward.

Clarification / Reminder: In the past, we have always revealed the MJM answer on Wednesday even if answered correctly on Monday or Tuesday, as some folks like to play even if they aren't the first to figure it out. If I can get spoiler tags working for the MJM, and if my schedule permits, I will post the correct answer behind a spoiler tag once it's been guessed correctly no matter when that happens. But if not, for future reference, when I say "No hint needed this week" that means that one of the comments contains the correct answer (I'll try to avoid hypercryptic metahints), and I'll post the answer Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. See you next week!

Phish.net is giving away two pairs of tickets to the Mike Gordon show at The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday, January 29, 2016, courtesy of the promoter, Goldenvoice. To make this giveaway a bit more fun than a lottery, we're going to have two contests for a pair of tickets each, one this week and one closer to the show in January.

Our experience with Mystery Jam Mondays is that the house usually loses, because some of you are so darned knowledgeable and quick with the right answer. So we've decided to make these contests a bit more difficult by asking about Mike's artistic endeavors other than his (or Phish's) music.

So, the winner of Contest #1 will the first person who correctly answers all four questions below (in the comments to this blog post, like the MJM contests) about Mike's literary work, from his story "Infantry" (Mike's Corner):

1. How many angry babies took the jet elevator to the 90th floor of the Hennison Building?

2. What did one stunned baby say when he saw Arthur Doubletrouble Hennison lying facedown on his desk, dead?

3. Did Alfred Buggyboo do it?

4. Who is Buggyboo?

Good luck!

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On Wednesday, October 21st, the Burlington Lead Program and The Lead Safe America Foundation (a 501©3 nonprofit for childhood lead poisoning prevention) are collaborating to host a free, open-to-the-public special engagement preview screening of the upcoming documentary feature film on childhood lead poisoning "MisLEAD: America's Secret Epidemic" in Burlington, Vermont at the Main Street Landing Filmhouse.

Jon Fishman will be introducing the film and speaking on the post-screening discussion panel as a local parent of a lead poisoned child.

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/547285018761183

Trailer: http://www.MisLEADMovie.com/

There is a second event on Friday October 23rd in Brattleboro, VT. Jon Fishman will also appear at that one. https://www.facebook.com/events/1692565317629494/

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[Editor's Note: We welcome back phish.net contributor and musicologist Mike Hamad, who shares his thoughts on the "Modulating Jams of Summer 2015." Below is the last of three parts. Part 1; Part 2. -PZ]

Compound MODs: My Double Wants to Pull Me Down
Four jams this summer modulated twice before calling it quits. I’ve been referring to these jams as double – or compound – MODs. They function by simply combining two of any of the four MODs (III, IV, V and flat-VII) discussed previously. These also happen to be monster jams; technically, they are the four most harmonically adventurous jams of summer 2015.

Table 7 lists the four Compound MOD jams Phish played this summer:

Pathways: the 8/1 “Tweezer” jam was the only compound MOD III-III of the summer, moving from A min (5:52-9:51) > C maj (9:51-23:46) > min > E-flat maj (2:47), which led right into “Waiting All Night” (also in E-flat). Also notable: two simple MOD IIIs stuck together takes you a tritone distance (i.e. A > E-flat) from where you started.

After a long tonicization of F# (vi), the 8/8 “Disease” jam turns into a compound MOD IV-III jam, moving from A maj (4:44-10:46) > D maj (10:46-12:35) > min > F maj (12:35-14:27). This MOD IV is more the blissful type – more like a MOD III in spirit than a “gear-shifter,” as in the 8/22 “Caspian.”

The harmonic trajectory of the 8/12 “Twist” – a compound MOD IV-V jam – is from G min (2:27-6:03) > C maj (6:03-13:06) > G maj (13:06-22:42). It returns, in other words, to its starting key (G), but in a different mode. Several times during the jam, you can hear Mike try to return to the “Twist” motive, with little support from the others. The first MOD IV comes after an aborted tonicization of III; there’s often some searching that goes on before travel plans stick.

Finally, the Magnaball “Chalk Dust” (8/22) is a compound MOD IV-IV jam, one that keeps moving toward the flat-side of the circle of fifths: E min (6:08-7:34) > A maj (7:34-15:14) > D maj (15:14-18:55).

"Tweezer" – 8/1/15, Atlanta, GA

Honorable Mentions
Eight additional jams contain modulations that don’t hit the two-minute mark, usually to set up segues. Table 8 shows how long these MODs stayed there, and where they went. You’ll notice the subsequent songs (“segues into”) are all in the exact keys of these brief MODs. When I examined this group, it became clear that these weren’t true MODs; they’re more like ways of patching set segments together.

You may notice that the famous Nashville “Mike’s Song,” which marked the return of the second jam, didn’t even make it to Table 8. Each of the two separate jams, the first in F# minor and the second in F minor, as structural components; each begins and ends in the same key, without modulation. If one jam began in F# and moved to F, without being segmented by the band, it would be a different story.

Putting it all together
“Tweezer” -> “Caspian” nicely demonstrates two different approaches to the key of C major: the first, a sort of blissful settling-in (the MOD III in “Tweezer”) and the second, a ramping up toward an eventual peak (the MOD IV in “Caspian”). Yet, through it all, C major is C major is C major.

For many, the high point of the summer came at Magnaball during Saturday’s second set, with the 30-minute pairing of “Tweezer” and “Prince Caspian.” Taken as a single entity, “Tweezer” -> “Caspian” could be considered one monster compound MOD jam (III-V-IV, moving from A > C > G > C).

At 7:52 of “Tweezer” – a moment where the jam dips and blisses out (Page’s Rhodes is prominent, along with Trey’s ambient effects) – they modulate from A min > C maj (MOD III). Plenty of dissonance follows, up to around the nine-minute mark. Then, when fully committed to C major, the rest of the jam is all about introducing new chord progressions and staying on an upward dynamic slope. In the final minute Fishman all but drops out, and Trey tonicizes (“makes home”) G major (V in C), and that leads the way to “Caspian.”

4:48 into “Caspian,” Trey and Page start flipping the mode from G maj > min, leading to what many hear as return to “Tweezer” (Charlie Dirksen called this “a ‘Tweezer’ jam in the key of ‘Fuckerpants’”). They jam in G minor for another nearly eight more minutes (4:48-12:20) before a scorching MOD IV into C major–the same C major we heard in “Tweezer,” only different, more fully alive, shifting into high gear the high gear of your soul.

"Tweezer" > "Prince Caspian" – 8/22/15, Watkins Glen, NY

Where do they go?
The reason I started looking into this stuff in the first place: while listening to the 9/6 “Carini” in real-time, I heard a move from E min > A maj (MOD IV) only seventeen seconds into the jam. That’s unusual.

Like others on Twitter at the time, I called “Tweezer” (A min). But that would have been too easy; six minutes (of A major) later, I realized: they aren’t going into “Tweezer.” That’s too much time in A (major or minor), assuming a long “Tweezer” jam would likely follow the song-part.

Which led to a general principle I’ve stumbled onto when segueing out of modulating jams. I call this the “non-jam-song exception”:

• if they’ve jammed for a long time in a certain key (i.e. A major in the example above), they generally are not going to segue into a jam song in the same key.
• they can (and often do), however, segue into a non-jam song (“Joy,” “Shade,” “My Friend,” “Waiting All Night,” “The Line,” “Bug,” “Dirt,” “Wading,” “Waste,” “Lizards” etc.). The modulating part of the jam, in these cases, is a sort of pre-jam, tacked on before a non-jam song.

Table 9 shows how modulating jams segue into non-jam songs in the same key:

Naturally, there are other exceptions – long, modulating jams that do segue into other jam songs in the same key.

• After a MOD flat-VII from G minor to F major, the 7/31 “Twist” gives us six long minutes in F major before a segue into “Back on the Train” – arguably a jam song – in the same key.
• As noted earlier, the 8/7 “Chalk Dust” serves up seven whole minutes in A maj before the subsequent (excellent) segue into “Tweezer,” a jam song that’s also in A. (I feel confident the E > A > E sandwich created by the two songs makes up for it.)
• The 8/21 “Ghost,” which moves from A min > C maj (MOD III) leads to a jam song – “Rock and Roll” – that’s also in C major. (Many people online expressed their displeasure with this segue.)
• Similarly, the 8/22 “Blaze On,” after modulating from C# > E maj, stays there for six-and-a-half minutes before segueing into “Possum,” (arguably) a jam song that’s also in E.
• The final set at Magnaball served up a whole lot of time in the same key: the 8/23 “Disease” moved from A maj > D maj (MOD III) and remained there for more than six minutes before segueing into “Scents and Subtle Sounds” (also in D, and arguably a jam song).
• The 9/6 “Chalk Dust” spent 8.5 minutes spent in G maj before segueing into “Twist” (in G minor).

Conclusion
Before we go touting the harmonic adventurousness of the summer 2015 tour, it’s important to remember the 7/13/14 “Chalk Dust,” which went all over the place: E min > D maj > F# min > E-flat > F > D-flat, before landing in B major (for “Light”). If you squish it all together within the space of an octave (and switch every flat to sharp), that’s C#-D-D#-E-F-F#, or the entire chromatic set between C#-F#. They spent time, in other words, in every tonal area in the span of a perfect fourth. That’s craziness. Nothing in 2015 even comes close.

You can – and should – enjoy Phish jams without thinking about or hearing modulations. For me, new keys and modes are like colors changing in front of my eyes. I can’t ignore them. They’re as real as anything else I experience at a show. It’s not something I can shut off.

But I’m happy knowing that very few other bands change keys and modes spontaneously during jams the way Phish does. (The Grateful Dead didn’t.) You can take the methodology I’ve outlined in this article and back it up through 3.0, to 2.0 and 1.0, as a way of measuring how truly exploratory this band was during a given era or tour. It’s a ton of work, but it’s totally worth it.

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[Editor's Note: We welcome back phish.net contributor and musicologist Mike Hamad, who shares his thoughts on the "Modulating Jams of Summer 2015." Below is the second of three parts. If you missed it, you may wish to start with part one. Part three will run tomorrow. -PZ]

PART TWO
Modulation Types & Pathways
The 37 modulating jams of summer 2015 fall into five categories. I’ll discuss these in turn, along with common pathways (and exceptions) for getting from point A to point B (and sometimes, to point C). These five categories, and the number of jams they contain, are included in Table 2:

MOD III: The Light is Growing Brighter
Tonal music is based on the diatonic scale, in which two “tonics” (hence “dia-tonic”) – one major and one minor – compete for primacy. As a result, the keys built around those each tonic (B minor and D major, for example) are known as “relatives”; D is the relative major of B, and B is the relative minor of D. This extends enharmonically to any other set of relatives: A min/C maj, E min/G maj, and so on. Relatives share a key signature (two sharps, in the case of B/D) and the majority of their pitches (chromatic pitches, such as G# and A#, are brought in to tonicize B minor, but that’s not important here.)

In B minor, or any key, the chord built on the third degree of the scale (i.e. D major) is known as the mediant. MOD III jams, then, modulate from the tonic key (i.e. B) to the key located a minor third (three half-steps up on the piano keyboard) above it (i.e. D major).

MOD IIIs are close, easy modulations (there’s no change in location on the circle of fifths); the bassist simply chooses D, which already exists as part of the B minor scale, and makes it “home.” The other players simply buy-in with D major melodies and triads.

MOD III moves always progress from minor to major, and therefore they’re filled with a sense of light overcoming darkness, happiness defeating sadness, a feeling of bliss, and so on. MOD III moves, furthermore, frequently happen at a low point in the dynamic trajectory of a jam (in my schematics, I label these “DYN DIP”). The band often rests in the new key while figuring out what to do next.

"Twist" > "Light" – 7/24/15, Mountain View, CA

Table 3 shows the eleven MOD III jams Phish played this summer, including how long they spent in each key:

Pathways: MOD III jams that start in minor keys (“Chalk Dust,” “46 Days,” “Ghost,” “Tweezer”) simply flip over to the other tonic:

E min > G maj (“CDT”)
B min > D maj (“46 Days”)
A min > C maj (“Tweezer,” “Ghost”)

MOD III jams that begin in a major key (“Light,” “Golden Age,” “Piper,” “Blaze On”), however, require a little more work. In every case this summer, major-key jams flipped to the minor mode in the same key (what’s known as “mode-mixture”) before each move was made:

B maj > min > D maj (“Light”)
C# maj > min > E maj (“Blaze On”)
G maj > min > B-flat maj (“Piper”)
C maj > min > E-flat maj (“Golden Age”)

Why?
A minor and C major are relatives; they share tons of pitches. Moving from one to the other isn’t dramatic. A major (three sharps) and C major (no sharps), however, actually are sort of distantly removed from each other; going from one to the other, without preparation, is jarring (although the majority of Abbey Road is built on this very relationship).

Some interesting things happened in MOD III jams. The 8/4 “Golden Age” contains a transposed version of its signature bridge progression (“Love, don’t you falter,” or I-IV) into the new key (E-flat major). We heard the “Tweezer” riff in B-flat at the end of the 8/15 “Piper.” After three minutes of jamming in C major, the 8/22 “Ghost” segued into “Rock and Roll” (more on this later).

MOD IV: The High Gear of Your Soul
In any key, scale degree ^4, unlike ^3 or ^5, is a dissonance. And dissonance – in life and in music – usually leads to rapid change.

The chord built on the fourth scale degree, or IV, is often referred to as the subdominant. MOD IV jams modulate from the tonic (home) key (C major, for example) to the major chord built upon the fourth degree of the scale (five half-steps up on the piano keyboard, or F major). This represents a shift one step to the flat-side on the circle of fifths.

Like MOD IIIs, MOD IVs can either mean settling into a blissful resting place (the move from C maj > F maj in the Tahoe Tweezer comes to mind). More often, however, MOD IVs are immediate infusions of energy (as in the 8/22 “Caspian”). There’s occasionally some settling in once MOD IVs arrive, but often not much.

Table 4 lists the twelve MOD IV jams Phish played this summer, including how long they spent in each key:

Pathways: typically, MOD IVs don’t require a pathway. Mode-mixture is unnecessary. One member of the band simply bangs on the fourth scale degree. Because it’s dissonant, the others react pretty quickly. The destinations, at least in 2015, are always major keys (not minor iv).

(Quick aside: “Simple” jams usually begin with band members repeating a I-IV (F to B-flat) chord progression in F major. At 7:18 of the 8/21 “Simple” jam, they spontaneously decide to stop on the B-flat and quit alternating back to F.)

MOD V: Plugging the Distress Tube
The chord built on the fifth scale degree is known as the dominant. In tonal music, the dominant is the least stable place to be; the built-in tension resolves only with the return to the tonic (I) or a move to some other place (VI, or what’s called a deceptive cadence). In the Phish repertoire, “Steam” and “Maze” (each in G minor) are good examples of songs that have extensive jams in the dominant key (D maj/min). We all have felt how tense those jams are, for this and other reasons. When G minor returns in each case, at the end of the jams, it’s a relief.

None of that matters much here; modulations to the dominant key (seven half-steps up or five half-steps down on the piano keyboard), or MOD V, are less common than the other types, and they generally don’t feel all that tense.

Table 5 lists the three MOD V jams Phish played this summer, including how long they spent in each key:

Pathways: each of the three MOD Vs of summer 2015 preserves the mode of its starting key: 7/31 “KDF” moves from C min > G min; 8/7 “Tweezer” moves from A min > E min; 8/22 “Light” moves from B maj > F# maj. The MOD V in the 7/31 “KDF,” one of the longest jams of the summer, feels arbitrary; so does the move to F# maj midway through the Magnaball “Light” (8/22), but at least it demonstrates “Light” can do more than just MOD III.

The 8/7 “Tweezer” is notable because of what happens earlier: “Chalk Dust Torture,” a MOD IV (E min > A maj), gives us a long taste of A-ness long before “Tweezer” arrives. The MOD V “return” back to E min in “Tweezer,” then, feels like a return to the “Chalk Dust” jam. If you reduce the Blossom “CDT” -> “Tweezer” down to keys and modes, it looks like this: E min > A maj/min > E min (or I - IV - I). More than any other pairing of the summer (except, maybe, for the Magnaball “Tweezer” -> “Caspian,” discussed later), the Blossom “CDT” -> “Tweezer” acts like a unified whole.

MOD flat-VII: Now I’m on My Way
A MOD flat-VII move involves a major key jam (A major, for example) that modulates to a major key located one whole-step below (two half-steps down on the piano keyboard, or G) the tonic key.

The MOD flat-VII category has a dual nature. From a major key to another major key, MOD flat-VII represents the biggest tonal leap (two flat-side steps on the circle of fifths) of any of the MODs this summer. The three “Disease” jams (8/2, 8/5 & 9/6) that contain MOD flat-VII moves all go from A major to G major–keys that are (relatively) distant.

A minor key and a major key located a whole step apart, however, such as G minor and F major (7/31 “Twist”), or E minor and D major (8/1 “Carini”), fit right into a diatonic key (I-ii-iii-IV-V-vi-viio-I), as ii-I or vi-V, without much effort. These are tonal slots we’re used to hearing.

"Down with Disease" – 9/6/15, Commerce City, CO

Table 6 lists the seven MOD flat-VII jams Phish played this summer, including how much time they spent in each key:

Pathways: Two possible pathways to get to MOD flat-VII include two quick MOD IVs (i.e. D > C > G in the 7/24 “Hood”); a short MOD III > MOD V (G > B-flat > F in the 7/31 “Twist”); or some other, more obscure pathway. Sometimes it’s just about opening up new tonal spaces that aren’t MOD IIIs (via mode-mixture) or MOD IV (though they do that in the 8/23 “Disease”; see above).

MOD flat-VII was the most popular modulation for “Disease” jams this summer (three of them). The 7/24 “Hood” jam, as I mentioned earlier, is an anomaly: a Type I jam song with a four-minute excursion into a (relatively) foreign key (C maj). It’s probably the most harmonically adventurous 3.0 “Hood” since 7/1/14, which spent a significant amount of time in G maj/min (MOD IV). MOD flat-VIIs in two jams on this list, the 8/1 “Carini” and 9/4 “Fuego,” barely cracked the two-minute mark, and are therefore just slightly more than last-minute swerves to segue into other songs, which might explain why a more distant modulation was chosen.

[The third and final part of this series will run here in the phish.net blog tomorrow...]

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[Editor's Note: We welcome back phish.net contributor and musicologist Mike Hamad, who shares his thoughts on the "Modulating Jams of Summer 2015." Below is the introduction and part one, of three parts. Parts two and three will run here early next week. -PZ]

Not counting the Magnaball Drive-In Jam, Phish played 513 songs - roughly three days of non-stop music - during the summer 2015 tour, spread across 51 sets and 25 shows in 16 different venues. That's a lot of music.

A minor subset - 37 songs, clocking in at nearly ten hours - stands out not because of how good it was, but because of what happened during those ten hours: in every case, the band, as a unit, changed keys. In musical/analytical circles, this is known as "modulation."

Each modulation lasted more than two minutes. It's an arbitrary amount of time that I chose to distinguish between structural modulations, or key changes, that I felt would unmistakably weaken the music if they weren't there, and last-minute swerves, to enter new keys and set up subsequent segues to other songs. Anyway, two minutes is a good, round number.

Technically speaking, this group of 37 jams represents the most harmonically adventurous collection of improvisational rock music played by Phish during the summer - the Type II-est of the Type IIs. In this series I'll discuss the different types of modulation practiced by Phish, the common pathways they use to get where they're going, and where they ended up on the other side.

In part one, I'll talk about modulation in a general sense, before getting into the group of 37 jams that meets these conditions. In part two, I'll lay out the four different types of modulation heard in the summer of 2015, as well as common pathways heard in each category. Finally, in part three, I'll discuss compound modulations, jams that nearly made the cut, and how Phish treats segues after modulating jams.

PART ONE
What is modulation?

Inclusion on this list has nothing to do with taste (or even "Taste"). Each song/jam meets a single condition: it modulates to a new key for longer than two minutes. Improvisational rock music has many things going for it, and modulation is only one. Obviously it's possible to enjoy Phish jams without hearing any of these, and that's because, at its most elemental, Phish music is dance music.

I've written about Phish and modulation for phish.net, and also for Lawn Memo's The Daily Ghost. Improvising rock musicians - arguably all musicians - think in terms of keys (F, G, A, D, etc.) and modes (major, minor, Dorian, Mixolydian, Lydian, Phrygian, pentatonic, and so on). Part of that is physical, and has to do with hand placement on an instrument. Piano players can attest that playing in B minor, for example, feels very different than playing in A minor; the same goes for the guitar and bass. (You may recall Trey's comment to Phish.net member Andrew Hitz, when they discussed the Mike's Song second jam in Nashville: "Ooh, I like jamming in F.")

Modulation isn't required for a jam to be considered "good" (check out the list of honorable mentions later in this article). But looking across Phish's enormous output over the years, there's an argument to be made that a significant percentage of Hall of Fame jams modulate at some point. (A quick scan of Matt Burnham's HOF poll tells me that six of the seven Tier 1 jams modulate.)

In a general sense, every Phish jam starts out the same way: in a certain key (A, for example, if you're talking about "Ghost") and mode (minor; more specifically, the Dorian mode, which employs the raised ^6 scale degree and the flatted ^7 scale degree). Countless "Ghost" jams (7/21/15, for example) begin and end in the same key and mode, without straying, and they're awesome.

After a while, particularly during longer jams, ears and fingers get tired of being in (and hearing) the same key and mode. Phish often switches modes from major to minor (what's known as "mode-mixture") for variety, while remaining in the same key. Mode-mixture is fairly easy, and Trey or Page, because they play chordal instruments, are responsible for this slice of the pie.

Modulation occurs when Mike decides he's going to make a new tonal center the "tonic," or "home." The lowest voice in any musical texture has this power. It's some sort of physical thing, but it's true. The other guys can (and very often do) signal that they want to go someplace else, but Mike has to buy in.

Still, I'd argue that modulation is an important part of what makes great Phish jams great. You'll find many of the most talked-about jams of summer 2015 on this list: Atlanta "Kill Devil Falls"; Blossom "Chalk Dust Torture" -> "Tweezer"; Mann "Twist"; MPP "Twist"; Magnaball "Bathtub Gin," "Tweezer" -> "Prince Caspian," and "Blaze On"; Dick's "CDT" and "Down with Disease," and so on.

Other beloved 2015 jams are not on the list: Bend "Simple"; Nashville "Stash" and "Mike's Groove"; Mann "Cities" & "Scents and Subtle Sounds"; MPP "David Bowie," and so on. I'll discuss some of these later.

Table 1 lists the modulating jams of summer 2015:

Date	Location	Songs
7/24	Shoreline, CA	"Twist," "Light," "Harry Hood"
7/28	Austin, TX	"Ghost"
7/29	Grand Prairie, TX	"Chalk Dust Torture"
7/31	Atlanta, GA	"Ghost," "Kill Devil Falls," "Twist"
8/1	Atlanta, GA	"Tweezer," "Carini"
8/2	Tuscaloosa, AL	"Down with Disease"
8/4	Nashville, TN	"Golden Age"
8/5	Kansas City, MO	"Down with Disease"
8/7	Cuyahoga Falls, OH	"Chalk Dust Torture," "Tweezer"
8/8	East Troy, WI	"Down with Disease," "Light"
8/9	East Troy, WI	"Tweezer"
8/12	Philadelphia, PA	"Twist"
8/15	Columbia, MD	"46 Days," "Piper"
8/16	Columbia, MD	"Twist"
8/21	Watkins Glen, NY	"Simple," "Bathtub Gin," "Chalk Dust Torture," "Ghost"
8/22	Watkins Glen, NY	"46 Days," "Tweezer," "Prince Caspian," "Blaze On," "Light"
8/23	Watkins Glen, NY	"Down with Disease"
9/4	Commerce City, CO	"Golden Age," "Fuego"
9/5	Commerce City, CO	"Chalk Dust Torture"
9/6	Commerce City, CO	"Down with Disease," "Carini"

Why these particular songs?

In this group of 37, you'll notice that there are only seventeen different song titles. Alphabetically, these are: "46 Days" (2 examples), "Bathtub Gin" (1), "Blaze On" (1), "Carini" (2), "Chalk Dust Torture" (4), "Down with Disease" (5), "Fuego" (1), "Ghost" (3), "Golden Age" (2), "Harry Hood" (1), "Kill Devil Falls" (1), "Light" (3), "Piper" (1), "Prince Caspian" (1), "Simple" (1), "Tweezer" (4) and "Twist" (4).

The most exploratory song of summer 2015, if you wish to count them, was "Disease" (five modulating jams), followed by "Chalk Dust," "Tweezer" and "Twist" (four each); "Light" and "Ghost" (three each); and "Carini" and "Golden Age" (two each).

This group of seventeen contains several different types of songs. Some are open-ended, meaning we don't expect them to return to any sort of "head," and are therefore natural choices for exploratory, Type II jams. Among this group: "46 Days" (it's usually the second jam, though 8/22 only has one jam), "Carini," "Down with Disease," "Ghost," "Golden Age," "Light," "Piper," "Simple," "Tweezer" and "Twist." Some of these had typical returns in earlier days, and some still do return to the head; see the 7/25 "Disease", for example.

Building on what they've done with "Chalk Dust Torture" in 3.0, its appearance on this list is no surprise. Prior to 2015, however, Type II "Chalk Dust" jams (7/13/14 or 8/3/14, for example) took off in the middle of the song, without the final chorus, and are therefore labeled "unfinished" by the phish.net setlist gurus. That changed in 2015; every "Chalk Dust" played during the summer was of the finished short: after a short guitar solo, Trey signaled the return of the chorus. Modulatory "CDT" jams, a la 8/31/12, are what you'd call "second jams."

"Bathtub Gin" typically returns to its C-major head before ending (8/21 is no exception), but I'm also not surprised that at least one version got spun out in 2015 (oh, and WHAT a spinning out that was). "Fuego" sometimes ends formally (see: 7/25), but it also occasionally spins out without modulating (8/11) or spins out with modulation (9/4, and many examples in 2014).

"Blaze On," a new song in 2015, always concludes before it either spins out (as on 8/22) or does not (7/28 and several others). Two additional songs - 7/31 "Kill Devil Falls" and 8/22 "Prince Caspian" - normally conclude and don't get that spun out - but these two certainly did.

"Harry Hood" is another story. In 3.0, it's unusual to hear a "Hood" jam that modulates, but it happened on 7/24, when we heard four minutes (!) of a modulation from D major to C major (flat-VII, from 8:26-12:28).

"Hood" is part of a group of songs typically known in 3.0, with important exceptions, as Type I jam vehicles, along with "Antelope," "Bowie," "Stash," "Mike's Song," "Reba," "Runaway Jim," "Split Open and Melt," "Wolfman's," "YEM," and a few others. These are some of the most welcome jam songs in the 3.0 repertoire, and they seldom modulate (although a frequent, welcome occurrence in this group is the appearance of a lengthy tonicization of another key).

Tonicization vs. Modulation
Tonicization occurs when a key area outside the tonic (i.e. the "home" key) is temporarily treated as the tonic. This new area feels like home for a little while, but not for long. Modulation, on the other hand, is deeper and more structural. (Note: all timings are from LivePhish.)

The 7/28 "Antelope," for example, is a jam that takes place in E minor, with a short tonicization of G major (III) from 4:11-4:42. For roughly 30 seconds, we feel like G major is home, before the bass slips back to E. It's a good jam, but it doesn't make this list because it doesn't technically modulate. The 8/22 "Antelope" tonicizes B major (V) from 4:52-5:39, then G major (III) from 5:40-6:18, for 1.5 total minutes of being displaced from E minor.

Similarly, in the 8/4 "Stash" jam, we hear fifteen seconds of a move from D minor to F major (III, from 6:20-6:34), then fifteen more seconds of an A major (V) tonic (from 6:35-6:50) before Mike re-settles in D minor. The 8/9 "Melt" jam (in C# minor) contains a lot of dissonance and harmonic ambiguity, but it briefly tonicizes B (7:35) and A (8:18). The 8/11 "Bowie" jam (in E minor) tonicizes G major (III) twice (at 5:27 and 6:55), and the 8/16 "Bowie" jam contains extensive tonicizations of A major (IV) at 8:09 and 9:17.

Tonicization frequently happens in jams that also modulate. The 8/1 "Tweezer," for example, a jam in A minor, contains a brief tonicization of D major (IV) from 8:25-8:46, before the eventual, seismic modulation to C major (III) at 9:51.

Location, location, location...
Not surprisingly, in 2015, the overwhelming majority of modulating jams occurred during second sets, either…

• in the opening slot (7/29, 8/7 & 8/21 "Chalk Dust"; 7/31 "Kill Devil Falls"; 8/1 "Tweezer"; 8/2 & 8/8 "Disease"; 8/4 "Golden Age")
• somewhere later in the second set (7/24, 7/31, 8/12 & 8/16 "Twist"; 7/24 & 8/8 "Light"; 7/24 "Hood"; 7/28 & 8/21 "Ghost"; 8/1 & 9/6 "Carini"; 8/5, 8/23 & 9/6 "Disease"; 8/7, 8/9 & 8/22 "Tweezer"; 8/15 & 8/22 "46 Days"; 8/15 "Piper"; 8/22 "Caspian"; 9/4 "Golden Age"; 9/4 "Fuego"; 9/5 "Chalk Dust")
• or in the one third set of the summer (8/22 "Blaze On" & "Light").

We've come to expect harmonic exploration in second sets, in other words, because that's when usually happens.

Three exceptions: the first-set Ghost on "7/31," which returned back to its home key (A minor) after a five-minute jam in D major (IV). And Magnaballers were treated to rare, modulating first-set bookends - the "Simple" opener and "Bathtub Gin" set closer - a phenomenon that recalls the latter years of 1.0.

[Look for parts two and three here at the phish.net blog next week...]

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