Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

For this blog I just wanted to comment on the discussion we had on Wednesday.

Among the several things that called my attention, there were to points that particularly interested me.  First was the idea of creativity as something new or as a recycling of old ideas.    Then was the matter about music recordings and how they improve (or not) our experiences as listener and/or composers.

We discussed how we saw the recycling of old music styles, and how it can be argued than now nothing is actually creative or new, as it is all based on something done before.  Then someone said something I thought was interesting in this context.   It was raised that access to music recordings can improve composition, as we can re-listen to cool spots and therefore easily start pointing out to what we like and think could improve a particular composition.   But doesn’t this activity of repeated listening feeds the recycling of music?  If we listen a piece we like again and again (assuming that we don’t get sick of it) wouldn’t we be more vulnerable to end up copying particularities of that piece ⎯hence recycling it?
So, although I don’t think that recycling happens more now than it did in the past.  I do think that recorded music does help with it.     If we only had the chance to listen to something a couple of times, we would have to fill the blanks in cool spots ourselves ergo pushing our own creativity.

I want to comment on one of the songs Erin brought to class, In the Beginning by K’naan.
When I heard this song in class I did not understand most of the lyrics, with the exception of the spoken part at the end.  I thought the song was really cheerful so I listened to it again.  One of the advantages of YouTube is of course that you can find homemade videos of songs that include the lyrics.
I thought the way they delivered the message of the song was quite clever ⎯I am not familiar with the singer, so I don’t know if this is somehow different to the rest of his work.   I am supposing it is usual for him to mix traditional African sounds with more contemporary/western sound, such as hip hop.
I found interesting how he presented the semantic meaning of his lyrics with    this mixture of sounds.   He sings for freedom, but he presents it in a way that resembles a legend / oral story of some kind.   I just wanted to share how cool I thought this union was, as I think it fits perfectly.   There is a lot of songs that present this same theme, freedom, but I have not heard many where this story approach is taken.

I want to blog this week about the Eight Blackbird concert.

I think the first piece by Reich, the Cello Counterpart, was a wonderful performance, not only by the musician, but as a general presentation.  I will not take time on this piece because I would just end up repeating how much I liked it.
Instead I am going to talk about the first piece Eight Blackbird performed, Knight, Death, and Devil by Rzewski.    This piece is far for being the favourite composition of Rzewski I have heard, but it was very interesting to see performed.    The most obvious point to mention is the broken glass-broken plates period in the middle of the piece.   The percussionist got into work globes and glasses and broke glass and plates inside a garbage can he was using as percussion.  He hit the can repetitively wit a stick and by throwing it from over his head.  Then he made noise with his finger in the metal.    This period of apparent randomness was definitely something I did not understand at all, but that certainly blended with other absurd aspects of the composition.
The other aspect I think was interesting was the vocals.   The performers would at some points make vocal noises, both similar to singing and just “coughing” noises.  This was once enlarged by the fact that everyone took their tongues out after a particular part of the performance.
Knight, Death, and Devil was a very mixed composition.  It had parts when all the instruments came together in harmony and was really easy to digest, only to then break into disorder and dissonance.     I thought this composition was interesting, although I would like to hear more about the specific parts of it and their importance towards the piece as a whole.  I particularly thought the glass event was really random and had no other hooks in the rest of the piece, I didn’t see the need for it.  While commenting with other people that went to the concert, there was an opinion, that I  myself share that this event just wanted to make the piece seem intellectual by confussing the audience.

I really enyojed the pieces that Caroline took to class on monday.

When she told us that it was a guitarrist she was showing, I wasn’t expecting that, but something more similar to classical guitar.  I really like how she uses the banging (?),  hitting of the guitar…  I have heard this before, but never as such a big (the biggest part, I would say, of the composition).

This is a very short, very lame post, I am sorry… I will just finish saying that I thought Kiki King’s work was fasinating and that I would like to hear more of it.

I want to comment this week on my opinions about the song David took to class.

This song was really interesting.  The general form of the composition was similar to the songs we tend to hear in class, but the voice and way to present the lyrics was similar to some popular contemporary music.  I commented in this in class but I want to repeat it.  I was first really annoyed at the voice of Joanna Newsom, I thought it was really unpleasing.  I couldn’t at first consentrate in the music itself as I was so busy being annoyed at the singer.  Then an interesting thing happened, I stoped caring about her and  starting being drawn into the song itself.  It overwhelmed me, and I ended up thinking that it was a beautiful, incredibly human composition.  After thinking about it after class, I related to other similar event that I will share even when it has no relevance.  There is this play, I can’t remember the name of it, where there were around 10 or 15 naked women on the stage. As the play began, they started showing different levels of sadness and anguish, asking for help, begging for something, crying.  As audience, similarly than with “Only Skin”, you would focus first on the nudity of the act for then start looking over it into the more profound meaning.

I think my experience with this song was really great, as it was the first time where I had a complete change of mind about a song while it was playing.  Sorprisingly, it was for the better.

I want to comment on the Alvin Curran Concert on Wednesday.  I went to this concert not really knowing what to expect from it.  The concert was really interesting as the pieces differed greatly between each other.

I want to talk about TransDadaExpress 2 ⎯Extraordinary Renderings.   This was the piece that closed the concert.  It was written in 2006 to be performed in the spot, without any established structure.  It sound is based in recordings of real and created sounds, e.g. laughs, automobile sounds, singing.    These unnumbered sounds were acceded through a keyboard.  According to what I heard, every key in Alvin Curran’s keyboard can access about three different sounds, which will give you an idea.

Anyway, I decided to write about this particular piece because it was the one I liked the least from those performed in the concert.  I found the other two pieces really fascinating, especially VSTO, which was the second performed.  This was an incredible experience, completely different to what I expected.

Going back to TransDadaExpress 2 ⎯Extraordinary Renderings, I felt it was a really random piece.  Although, as I think that his storage of both weird and everyday sounds in impressive, I didn’t see what made this composition more than just playing around with the keyboard.
Curran would play the keys as he felt like it, with no apparent reason whatsoever.  I found this piece at times offending.   Some of the sounds he tried out were completely disastrous.   This piece wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, and it didn’t seem to have any intellectual focus that made it interesting.

I think I have to start this blog commenting on my superficial thoughts on the fragments of In C.   When I heard the explanation of the piece, and how it was meant to be played, my first thought was “well, that’s clever”.   I started listening to the composition and I was trying really hard to follow the individual instruments through their journey through the song.  It didn’t take me long to realize that was not going to be fully posible.  I often lost track of the instruments when they changed segment.  This way I noticed there were several segments which were easier to catch, I mean that it was easy to stablish what segments in the music were the segments I was listening to.

Anyway, when I heard the second version of In C, the one performed with vocals, I was really surprised how different this actually was… Obviously I knew it was going to be diferent, but I didn’t imagine the extent in which it was going to vary.  (The second version was so much cooler btw).    In this version you could hear the voices fade easier and the change in the entonation.

Finally I just want to comment of the Radiohead song, Everything in its Right Place, I would have never seen the relation between these two pieces.  I probably just did because I was looking really hard for it. Anyway, I thought that what the way Radiohead found inspiration in In C, and adapted it to their own style was really cool.   In C can be a million different compositions, and I think Radiohead proves it.

It was hard for me to decide in which piece I wanted to write about this week.  I really enyojed all the pieces in the class, but when I was hearing them again, I wasn’t able to reproduce the response I had towards them in class.  It was hard for me therefore to try to explain what impression this pieces made on me.

I enyojed “Q” very much.  I remember fist listening to it, and for a moment not realizing what was going on.  It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the sound I was focusing on came from the oscillators (dah…)  I started hearing the oscillators as producing a circular sound.  I remember that during the first third or so of the piece I was felling a little bit alarmed, maybe because of the intencity that the piece maintained.

As I started getting into the piece, and because what was going on in the classroom, I starting realizing how hard all my body was vibrating.  My pulse was up.  I had a very strong physical response to this piece, but not a negative one, I didn’t feel opressed or nervous for a change.

I decided to do my blog this week in Stockhausen Stimmung.  I will not lie and say that I listened to the complete piece multiple times.  Instead I listened to random sections of it, and then, mostly because of chance, I decided to centre in the segments 26 to 28.
These segments show really varied styles.  Not only they have repetitions and magic words but they also include several things I found really interesting.  The first of these takes place in the segment 26 at 0:48 where, for around 5 seconds there is a deep laugh.  I thought this was interesting, but somehow unbalancing.  I think this presented a type of element of surprise.  Even when this segment escalates into that point, as I wasn’t expecting it at all and, for the first couple of times I heard this, it still kept on surprising me a little.

I think that segment 27 was the least interesting of those I focused on.  I think it was just like a low point before segment 28, which is, by much, my favourite.  The rhythm presented in 27 spills into segment 28.  And until 0:45, there is no mayor change in the sound.  At 0:45, this changes as a declamatory voice is introduced.  One of the longer poems of Stimmung is located in this part.

When I first listened to this poem, I was astonished.  It literally got me to sit there with my mouth open staring to the computer.  Until 2:23, the voice is accompanied with the rest of the voices following the same pattern they had at the beginning.   At this point everything stops for 6 whole seconds, after this the voice says a couple of lines unaccompanied, and then the voices follow.   This was amazing, I heard it again and again, and again. There was something incredible about it.  The voice was really low, making changes in the intonation, and making it somehow musical.
After hearing it a couple of times I started to listen to the lyrics of this, using my very poor knowledge of German to try to figure out what they were saying.  I failed miserably and only achieved to pick up some random phrases and lines, enough to make me more curious.  Then I remember what I had read in the background information, about the poems being directly erotic, and then I got even more curious, so I looked for the lyrics online:
(www.hyperion-records.co.uk/notes/66115-B.pdf).

If  you haven’t done so, I would recommend you to read them, they are under sections 32, and then another large poem in section 12.   After reading this, the way I perceived the poem, and the changes in intonation was highly increased.  I look quite badly for the rest of the poems, but I couldn’t find them.   It was amazing.  The poem is direct, but in context it makes complete sense.   You can see that the silences are set in a perfect spot.
I loved this, I didn’t get anxious or any of the other physical reactions I usually have with what we listen in class.  It was great.

When I listened to this piece again, after the Wednesday discussion in class,  I found that my perception of this piece has had changed greatly.
If I had to listen only to the beginning of this song,  I would reckon that it does not give you an indication of what you are going to experience through out the piece.   The start of Atmospheres is quite simple,
As the melody gets more complicated,  images start appearing.  I had not noticed the similarities with nature that we discussed in class, although I had experienced the “good vs. evil” feeling many of the class shared.  As I heard it again I noticed a  part, starting at minute 5:11, where there is a particular chaos.  As I heard, I couldn’t help noticing that this particular period of time did not resemble nature, but the opposite, it sounded to me like the chaos of  civilization, with its noise and traffic.  This part seems antagonistic to the nature, which indeed can be related with many of the parts of the piece.   All the straight points in the song have an element of chaos, but in this part, this element is particularly strong.