Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

Gavin Bryar’s hour-long piece inspired a multitude of feelings. I was taken aback by the fact that, at the end of the piece, the tramp’s melody hadn’t become monotonous, hadn’t adopted a feeling of repetitive hopelessness. Instead, his voice created a sense of contentedness. I was happy to hear him singing over and over. One element that may have created this feeling was the ever-changing, ever-beautiful orchestration behind him. The direction that Bryar took each movement in allows a sense of separation from movement to movement with an underlying interconnectedness throughout the whole piece. I felt that each movement could have existed as a piece in and of itself. This may have made it an easier process to listen through all of them in succession. My favorite effect in the piece was achieved when Tom Waits sang with the tramp. Tom’s voice on top of the tramps inspires all sorts of comparisons. I like when music has connotations outside of the music like that…some sort of message. Tom Waits has one of the most recognizable voices ever recorded, and the tramp could be a billion different people and I wouldn’t know the difference. Even still, the beauty inherent in the tramp’s melody is not overshadowed by Tom’s vocals. Instead, the two voices synergistically create a greater beauty, representative of the every day man and the celebrity coming together. The piece simultaneously elevates the tramp to a new status by putting him next to a celebrity, and humanizes Tom Waits by putting him next to the tramp. A sort of de-emphasis on the importance of celebrity. I really enjoyed that.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Bryars, david. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.