2B — Thursday, March 24, 2016 the b-side The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW A broken record sputters and repeats, much like the opening of Little Scream’s “Love As a Weapon” music video. Zooming out of an ornate frame, the shot reveals singer Laurel Spren- gelmeyer lounging in a wooden chair, surrounded by wood-pan- eled walls. The scene changes only slightly with each repeti- tion, not unlike a game of spot the difference. The rest of the video follows in an equally quizzical fashion: metallic hands dancing in American Sign Language, tube lighting illuminating a man voguing and Sprengelmeyer dancing in a brightly lit entryway wear- ing a sequined windbreaker as he sings, “Remember your greatest gift is to dance.” The majority of the video is surreal, making it impossible for viewers to place the house in which the actions take place at a certain point in time or space — decades and genres are spanned. There doesn’t seem to be any connecting force between the barrage of scenes, colors and movements other than their randomness. It’s not until the shot again moves to the picture frame that opened the video that the pieces begin to fall into place. Continuing out through the frame hanging upon the wall, Sprengelmeyer is shown walking down a snowy lane alone, repeating “gonna work it out, gonna work it out.” As this sentiment echoes, we see Sprengelmeyer strutting through the snow, puzzling the same conundrum as the audience — how to make sense of the home within her head. - CARLY SNIDER B Love as a Weapon Little Scream SECRETLY CANADIAN the city but my observations at our destination also lead me to lend credence to Saunders’s statements regarding the posi- tive energy of the community. The trip in which I took part was actually one of Seven Mile’s newer offshoot programs, dedicated to a combination of visual art and creative writing. The art program goes to the neighborhood on a weekly basis. There are also two weekly music trips, a large trip with about 20 teachers on Fridays and a smaller trip with about six on Wednesdays. We arrived at the building of Mission: City — one of Seven Mile’s community center partners — around 7 p.m., finding a handful of students finishing some tutoring sessions. The common room of Mis- sion: City had the smell of an elementary school classroom and complimentarily themed decor (an example: a poster of check-boxes, reading “Bullies are: Not Cool, Not Friendly, Not Popular, Not Respected, Not Welcome, All of the Above,” the last option of which bore a big red checkmark). To our right a boy was constructing a Eiffel Tower-like structure using gumdrops and toothpicks. On the back wall of the community center there were several rows of uniquely patterned tiles, each apparently hand-crafted and bearing the name of a per- son or group to which it was presumably dedicated. While I conducted an inter- view with Saunders, students worked with Seven Mile’s art teachers on a Van Gogh-themed project. At the beginning of the activity, students wrote haikus about sunflowers, and then proceeded to draw their own sunflower images, using Van Gogh’s famous painting as a model. In a side room of the building, a couple of boys could be heard drumming on a table with markers, prompting Cece Simonsen, a teacher with Seven Mile, to say to Saunders, “Go talk to them; they should join the drum corps” — another of Seven Mile’s more recent pro- grams. During the course of the trip, Saunders showed me a closet full of the instruments Seven Mile uses, a collection of various keyboards, violins, cellos and guitars, most of which were purchased using money collected via a GoFundMe page. Like many nonprofit organizations, Seven Mile is frequently low on monetary resources, and relies upon public donations given through either their GoFundMe page or website. Currently, the organization is in the middle of an instrument drive, the goal of which is to collect both instruments and funds with which to buy more. “We’re doing an instrument drive with Spring Fest, with Music Matters … that’s the thing we’ve been (flyering) around campus about,” said LSA junior Mike Payne, Seven Mile Music’s board chair. “For the students who aren’t able — because of time com- mitments or for other reasons — who aren’t actually able to help us out by being a teacher, by being a volunteer, they still can do something,” Payne con- tinued. “If you haven’t played an instrument in a while, and you’ve put it down for a while, and you’re sort of at that point where you think you’ve moved on from it — that instrument still has a lot of value, especial- ly to the students that we work with that wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity to play. It could sit at home or it could be in the hands of a child.” In addition to the programs Seven Mile offers during the academic year, they also operate a summer camp in Brightmoor called Brightmoor Arts Camp, which has very similar aims to the main program, with slight additions. “It’s an eight-week program … the goal was to bring in some of the teachers we already had, but also bring in teachers and musicians from the community to make sure that the music and culture of the area was still being cultivated,” Payne said. “It really was something that was sourced from Detroit.” During the course of the previous summer camp, Saunders lived in Brightmoor in order to better get to know the community. Following his graduation from the University this semester, Saunders plans to move back to the neighborhood to continue growing the program as much as he can during a planned gap year before attending graduate school. “I’ve always dreamed big for this,” Saunders said. “I see this at first spreading to the (rest of the) city of Detroit … and then spreading around Michigan — Flint, Saginaw, Benton Harbor — some of the more underprivileged areas of Michigan.” In addition to the state of Michigan, Saunders has long-term goals for Seven Mile, which include dramatic expansion. “I definitely want it to go national,” Saunders said. “I think there is a need for this all over. I see a model where we provide start-ups at other universities — like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, we would provide an umbrella funding, curriculum, everything needed for a motivated student at Johns Hopkins to start a subsidiary program. I really want it to expand nationally, and I see that happening through the collegiate system.” Part of the reason why Saunders is so passionate about bringing music to disadvantaged children is his own early experiences with it, and the transformative effect it had on his life. “I started playing piano when I was about 10, and it really got me on a better track in life,” Saunders said. “I was just not doing well in school, I was not doing well socially, I just wasn’t doing well all around. And I discovered a love of music, I discovered I had a talent for it and I just discovered an outlet for myself.” Saunders also cited the posi- tive social health effects of music, particularly emphasiz- ing the impact it could have on children from underprivileged backgrounds. “Just on the most basic level, I think it is the purest form of emotional expression, so par- ticularly a child in a troubled circumstance, with a lot of emotions welling up inside of them, it gives them an outlet for those emotions,” Saunders said. “It’s not like these emo- tions disappear — either there’s an outlet or they fester and grow into something worse, like depression or violence. A lot of children in a neighbor- hood like Brightmoor have very few extracurricular activities … so they have very little to do with their time. Combine noth- ing to do with a very troubled situation and you often have a child getting into a bad circum- stance.” While expressing a wish to not overstate what he believed Seven Mile could accomplish — mentioning that the program would likely simply be a bright spot in the week for many of its students — Saunders did display optimism about the sort of existence-altering effects Seven Mile could possibly create. “I think it does have the potential to be transformative,” Saunders said. “If we find a couple children that really have the aptitude and passion for it, then this really could change the whole trajectory of their lives.” SEVEN MILE From Page 1B By CAROLINE FILIPS Senior Arts Editor By BEN ROSENSTOCK Senior Arts Editor Since 1928, the Michigan Theater has existed as a bastion of community culture. It was originally designed as a “movie palace” — an institution characteristic of the era — for silent films and stage productions. In these early years, it was common to preface films with a 30-minute stage show complete with an orchestra and pipe organ, which has persisted as an essential fixture of the theater. It’s nothing short of extraordinary for the Michigan Theater to boast two of these musical rarities, considering only 7,000 were assembled during the limited heyday of theater organ production, spanning from 1912 until 1932. These theater organs are a special type of pipe organ designed specifically for silent film accompaniments. Their ranks, or sets, of pipes, imitate the instruments of the bygone orchestras as much as possible — not just the percussive instruments of chimes and bells. Since 1971, these giant instruments have dwelled beside each stage of the Michigan Theater. They’re loud, and occasionally fear-inducing. They accompany theatergoers throughout the emotional journey of a silent film, or provide a soothing overture to preface the daily matinee. Today the Barton pipe organ of the main theater and the electric organ in the screening room are played by five organists — Henry Aldridge, Andrew Rogers, Stephen Warner, Lance Luce and David Hufford — and heard each day. “We are truly blessed to have the full support of the Michigan Theater staff,” Aldridge wrote in an e-mail interview with The Michigan Daily. “The Barton is an integral part of the theater’s activities. Patrons come early to the movies just to hear it.” For 40 years, Aldridge served as a professor of electronic media and film studies in the Department of Communication, Media & Theatre arts at Eastern Michigan University, with the organ serving as more of a hobby. Much like his other organist peers, he was always interested in music — the church pipe organs instantly intrigued him as a child. “Our church, St. Paul’s, had an outstanding music program, and I was very familiar with church pipe organs,” Aldridge wrote. During his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina, he began playing a small theater organ at the Center Theater in Durham. After coming to Ann Arbor in l970, Aldridge led a team of volunteers in working on the Michigan’s instrument in l971, beginning to play it in public in l972. He subsequently took theater organ lessons from Father Jim Miller of Fenton, Mich., through whom he met future fellow Michigan Theater organist Rogers. In an interview, Rogers referred to Father Jim as the best instructor in the area. “Music was always something that I tried to do in between the cracks of everything else,” Rogers said. What originally served as a hobby while Rogers worked at a plastics factory and then a travel agency became his primary source of income. Though Rogers now typically plays two to five times during the week, he’s always willing to substitute for fellow organists. “You like it that much?” the Daily asked. “That and it is my job,” Rogers said in response, laughing. “We’re really lucky to be here. It’s really a gift. To have an original organ in its original home is rare.” The instrument’s rarity surely makes it a local treasure, but it poses challenges for the primary musicians. Theater organs are considered a thing of the past, and music for them is no longer composed. “They can’t be taken on the road, and there aren’t too many places to play,” Rogers said. “It’s really a double-edged sword.” With minimal music for organists today, especially theater organists, the musicians must take on the role of composers and create original arrangements. For the organists of the Michigan Theater, this typically means creating their own film scores for upcoming silent films the theater will screen. The process is lengthy, often spanning two to three weeks, during which the organists watch the films over and over, collecting moments and emotions to reflect in the form of a compelling composition. “You’re taking this musical material, the basis, the melody, the harmony and just reorganizing it kind of in real time,” Warner, another of the organists, said. “You want to make what you do a part of the movie.” Usually, the organists start from scratch and watch the silent films without the provided score. According to Rogers, creating a successful score often means making sure the music doesn’t draw attention to itself. Still, the music does have the ability to control the audience’s expectations. Rogers referred to Hitchcock’s silent film “The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog,” which features a woman unwittingly falling for a Jack the Ripper-type serial killer, as an example. “Musically, I have to decide when to let you know she’s safe in his presence,” Rogers said. “(By using music), you actually control part of the plot.” “Try to capture the essence of what the filmmaker was trying to do,” Warner said. “Carry the emotion — intensify it, maybe, nuance it, but don’t change it.” Some film scores require more work than others. Warner said he often creates a theme and assigns variations to different characters. This requires practice playing pieces in different styles. The standard running time for these feature-length films is 70 minutes, but there are some more ambitious projects. For long films like the often four- hour-long epics of D.W. Griffith, the scores require broader brushstrokes; the music doesn’t change every 15 seconds. “I haven’t done (any of those) yet,” Warner said. “I don’t know if I have the guts to do it.” The Michigan Theater in particular offers the ability to expand the musical palates of its audiences, and it continually offers new opportunities for the organists themselves. “Being in a venue like this, you can be experimental,” Warner said. “I know I have an adventurous audience here.” To these organists, the relative obscurity of available organ music and the antiquated nature of the instrument doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer in the modern world. After all, the theater organ has always faced scrutiny. “Even in its heyday, there was certainly a tension between the theater organ and the classical organ,” Warner said. Warner also believes that the theater organ still has a place in modern music education. “This is something we should actually learn about,” he said. “(After all), my personal music interests are far before my time. I’d love to start bringing back some of my pop music.” Even if organ music never does make a significant resurgence, it still holds real value to the Michigan Theater organists. “The instrument has a huge, colorful palate, and it has a huge, expressive capacity,” Warner said. “In the end, that’s kind of the reason I play it. You can have some really magical musical moments, singing for your audience through this big mechanical beast.” ARTISTS PROFILE IN NICOLAS WILLIAMS/Daily The vintage organ helps give the Michigan Theater its charm. SINGLE REVIEW Late night, romantic ruminations over what could’ve been, what has been, and what may be; OVO Sound’s roster has a sizeable collection of artists who foster this sound, Drake most notoriously being the maestro of this aesthetic among them. Taking on the mantle from the Champagne Papi himelf, PARTYNEXTDOOR’s first single off his much awaited project, P3, is the latest example of the histrionic gunslinging of emotions that the two artists have become well known for. While “Come And See Me” isn’t anything particularly groundbreaking or new in its content or aesthetic, it’s a reassuring message from PND, giving fans of his hope after 2014’s critically panned PNDCOLOURS, his last major release. Reminiscent of PND’s emotional “Kehlani’s Freestyle/ Things & Such,” the Noah “40” Shebib produced track is a great backdrop for PND and Drake’s signature lamenting lyricism and emotional sound. PND claims “I’ll admit I’m sorry when I’m truly sorry,” and Drake suggests, “I know you got another nigga tryna play the part / Just cause he got a heart don’t mean he got heart.” PND is working with his bread and butter in “Come And See Me.” That might garner some critics, and it may leave something to be desired for some listeners. But all in all, the soulful arrangement of “Come And See Me” is a great move if he wants to safely drum up hype before P3’s release. - ANAY KATYAL B+ Come and See me feat. Drake PARTYNEXT- DOOR OVO SOUNDS CHECK OUT EVEN MORE ARTS ARTICLES ONLINE AT MICHIGANDAILY.COM/SECTION/ARTS “This really could change the whole trajectory.”