I wasn’t at class on Monday. I do not know what was covered, so I’m just going to write about John Luther Adams. At this point, he is by far my favorite composer we have listened to. I’ve listened through all of “The Far Country,” “Earth and the Great Weather,” and “The Light that Fills the World.” I have had a harder time enjoying the percussion pieces. After reading the articles put up for Monday’s class, I began to understand why I enjoy his work so much. Adams’s appreciation of nature as an entity and as musical inspiration instill his music with such a vibrance that his pieces almost feel alive. The drums pounding four minutes in to “The Far Country of Sleep” communicate such raw power while leaving so much open to individual interpretation. The band Sigur Ros released an album with nonsensical lyrics and blank liner notes so that listeners could fill in whatever words they were inspired with in hearing the music. A lot of what I’m hearing from Adams seems to offer a similar idea. Regardless of how the music is received, it seems so emotionally charged that it would be impossible to listen and not feel something significant. Listening to his music makes me want to visit the areas that he inhabited just to witness the grandness that inspired a large amount of his beautiful work.
So far I’ve had a difficult time deciding whether or not I’m a fan of Morton Feldman. When we listened to “Piano Four Hands” a few classes ago, I was extremely moved. I thought, and still think, that it is an extremely beautiful, emotionally rich piece. I had then jumped to the conclusion that I really liked Feldman’s work. This may have been a little early for such a decision. After a few listens through “Why Patterns,” I’m not sure if I can maintain the same opinion about him. Luckily, we have nearly twenty hours of his music on our iPods. At first I figured that the length of “Why Patterns” was what turned me off a little bit. Since, I’ve listened to more of the CD that includes “Piano Four Hands.” Some of the pieces (”Piano,” and “Piano Three Hands”) are much longer than the short work that I enjoyed. Even still, I manage a listening experience with these longer works more similar to my listening experience with “Piano Four Hands” than with “Why Patterns.” What have been my absolute favorite Feldman works that I’ve heard so far are some of the String Quartets. I haven’t had a chance to listen to many of them all of the way through, but all of the ones I have heard so far, whether in full or just excerpts, have been thrilling. For the most part, I have thoroughly enjoyed his work. I guess that I just listened to “Why Patterns” with the mentality that it was the be-all-end-all representation of Feldman’s work since it was the piece that professor Alegant selected for us to listen to. In many ways the piece is a good representation of Feldman’s compositional style. For some reason that I cannot seem to articulate, I am just not a huge fan of “Why Patterns.” It seems that it is my duty now to abandon the idea that my lack of interest in that one composition should cast a shadow on the rest of his works. I guess I’ve learned a lesson about the dangers of latching on to first impressions.
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.
I was absolutely stunned when we learned how intertwined “In C” and “Everything In It’s Right Place” are. I am still stunned. I have told at least five people about it, and they’re all excited for me to show them the similarities. Radiohead was my undisputed favorite band from 7th grade until the end of high school. I have heard Everything In It’s Right Place at least a few hundred times, and I had already noticed a lot of the qualities that were discussed as similarities between the two compositions. Even still, I didn’t think of the Radiohead song during either of the two versions of In C that we listened to. After we listened to both of those recordings, the first second of the Radiohead song made the connections apparent. Not having had any listening background in minimalism, I was previously unable to draw the parallels. In systematically dissecting the pieces and putting them back together virtually superimposed, I almost totally lost it. I’ve known that Jonny Greenwood, the guy who plays lead guitar and does most of Radiohead’s orchestration, listens to a lot of contemporary music similar to what we’ve been covering in class. I was aware that his listening influenced his orchestration of string parts and such, but not of full song structure. Since Monday’s class, I’ve done a little research and a lot more listening to Kid A from a minimalist/drone perspective, and I’ve found so many parallels. Nearly every song that I’ve inspected so far (I’m about halfway through the album) can be broken down and related in a similar way to the two that we chose. I would love to maybe discuss in class some more connections between Kid A and the music that our class is most heavily based on. All in all I’m having trouble vocalizing how the connections are affecting me. It’s pretty outrageous.
I was extremely impressed by the musicality of this piece. I have always associated sirens with fire engines and police cars and such, so they have always held slightly disturbing connotations for me. It was surprisingly easy to suspend my earlier notions of sirens and appreciate them as musical instruments. Everything we do in class pushes my personal definition of music and what is musical further and further from what it was when the semester started. The beauty of the interplay between the sirens is unmistakably musical. Every time one would start to build higher and louder, the excitement and curiosity about when it would peak and where the other sirens would be when the first one peaked kept me super alert and in tune with the music. The way the piece grew higher and louder each time the sirens grew again gave it the feeling of walking uphill. It just mounted higher and higher, and kept going after I thought it was going to start coming down. Just when it started to feel like it was vainly attempting to achieve infinity, it would back off and calm down. Every swell made me think about the fact that no matter how far it goes, it can always go farther. I really enjoyed the thought process that the music inspired.
As much as it pained me to listen to Phill Niblock’s “Kontradictionaries,” I came out of the experience an entirely new outlook on the power of music/sound. For roughly the first five minutes of the piece, I was able to concentrate fully on internalizing the sounds and achieving a fairly in depth understanding of how they were affecting me. The unwavering persistence and aggression of the music was what eventually made my mind wander. Since the sound was nearly uniform throughout, each time it there was a variation it was easily spotted and appreciated. Even with the variation, the entire piece instilled me with one unchanging emotion: anxiety. For the first five minutes the anxiety was interesting and bearable. After that the consistency of the music allowed me to lose interest somewhat. I was able to force myself to concentrate some and regain my footing in the drone, but I was quick to lose myself again. When the piece became background music to my daydreaming, the anxiousness grew exponentially. Since I wasn’t focusing on what was happening with the music and noticing all of the intricacies, it felt like it was nagging at me over and over. This made it even harder to try to get back into the flow of the music. Eventually the anxiety grew to the point that my whole body was sweating. Even now I’m actually feeling uncomfortable just recalling the memory. So although I may not sit down and listen through the piece again for pleasure, I have the utmost respect for how heavily it affected me.
Lontano as a whole seems to describe a long journey. From the start to about 1:55 everything feels beautiful and ready with just hints of the tribulations to come. At 1:57 when the strings enter with such a harrowing rhythmic pattern it feels as though an obstacle has presented itself. The sustained note above depicts the hero of the journey persevering over the evil which disappears at 2:39. Then the basses set up what seems to be a a much more difficult task to overcome. The loud noise at 3:30 and then the subsequent strings that come in at 3:54 almost set up a subplot in the hero narrative. And the crescendo and slow, steady rise in pitch create a feeling of deception. So the entire scenario is something like Hercules with the Nemian Lion. A beautiful woman is discovered who ends up being a terrible monster. From 5:10 on the hero is getting more and more wary about his situation, but also sucked further in. This continues until 6:30 when the danger reveals itself and the hero is presented with the tall task of fighting his way out. The near silence and then short bursts of loud noise could be the foe attacking the hero and then disappearing, only to come out and attack again. At 8:00 there is a face to face confrontation and the two just stare each other down until 8:21 when the hero realizes that he isn’t so different from his enemy after all. Disillusionment sends him into a panic at 8:55 that grows steadily into sadness and anger and hatred all at once represented by the low, middle, and high sections of the orchestra. These three emotions battle for prominence until 10:08 when the hero re-realizes his current task and discards his distractions and completes his duty. I know I may have taken that story a little far, but I just kept listening to it over and over again and piecing the thing together.
Powered by FireStats