Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

In class on Wednesday, I think one of the main ideas the discussion was heading towards was how composers are influenced by other music and how recordings have affected this.  Obviously composers have always been influenced by the music of other composers.  Brahms and Beethoven came up.  Where our discussion was heading, I think, was whether the degree of idea circulation allowed by recording has put a choke hold on musical creativity.  One fear from the article was that eventually we would reach a point where there was no ground yet uncharted, and all music would be regurgitation of the past.  Though I may be biased (I prefer Sgt. Peppers to Rubber Soul and Gould’s later recording of the Goldberg Variations to his earlier one) I don’t think that recording can really have such a negative influence on creativity.  The easy circulation of ideas has lead to an explosion of creativity. Just as Professor Alegant pointed out earlier in the semester, before the mid 20th century, there were clear strands and movements to follow in music, afterwords, it’s the Gordian knot.  As for putting a maximum on the total number of musical ideas possible, there will always be visonaries who can jump out of the system and create something new.  Merzbow is one.  I believe it was an earlier article of Ross’s which told of how Masami Akita simply decided to abandon all of his previous musical training to create an entirely new sound that broke all of the rules.  Were it not for Akita’s easy access to other music, how would he have known what to abandon?  Ultimately, I don’t think we will ever reach the end of musical (or artistic for that matter) creativity. Ever.  The more we explore, the more we will find that has yet to be explored.  Recording simply accelerates the process, just as modern technology has accelerated our learning in everything else.

Nothing from Nothing reminded me a lot of the Morton Feldman music that we listened to a while back.  I didn’t like this as much as Feldman’s music when I listened to it the first time.  I had trouble enjoying the piece’s silences as much as I do in Feldman’s works, and the music overall got repetitive.  All in all, I had trouble concentrating on Nothing for 20 minutes.  Then I discovered the iTunes visualizer.
With something to stare at, my mind no longer wandered.  The screechy flute sounds became brilliant showers of light, not unlike the enticing glare of burning magnesium. The vibraphone produced swirling streams of confetti.  The percussion beats that started about half way appeared as small hairs of light that disappeared almost instantly. Each time the piece faded to nothing, it held me in anticipation of the next burst of color.

Spoiler Alert: this blog contains details about the end of a movie. However, the film in question is extremely perplexing, so it won’t really spoil too much.

With this blog I kind of wanted to take a break from difficult music and talk about music I find to be euphoric.  Its not that I don’t like Du Yun and Lang, but euphoria isn’t what I would use to describe their music.  The Fountain is one of my favorite movies, and I would definitely describe its musics and visuals(or better the combination of the two) as euphoric.  The ending of the film in particular I find to be absolutely gorgeous.  The music is written for the film so the auditory and visual components of this scene match perfectly.

The scene begins like this.  Tom is traveling inside this ship to the heart of Xibalba, a nebula he believes to be the underworld, with a dead tree of life in tow. Its 2500 and, after confronting a hallucination of his wife, he finally accepts the situation at hand. Izzi(the wife) prompts Tom to “Finish It” and the concluding sequence begins.  Until this point, the music was lonely and reflective, but now it changes to a warmer, more enlightened mood. From this change in tone, the soundtrack builds a continuous sound bridge, unifying scenes from the films three, interwoven narratives, into a single conclusion. Tom remembers back to 2000, on a day when he and his wife went for a walk through the winter’s first snow.  Flashing back to 2500, Tom leaps from his bubble-ship and thinks back even further- to 1500.  The music gradually builds up to this point, not necessarily crescendoing, but rising in register.  At the transition, it falls back down.  We now see a conquistador(named Tomas) who was searching for the original Tree of Life confront its guardian.  Before we were led to believe he had died when he was struck by a flaming sword, but now we see the mayan warrior pull back as 25oo Tom appears.  At this point, the theme from the reflective music, actually a leitmotif for Xibalba, returns briefly, and and the Conquistador defeats the mayan and comes face to face with the Tree of Life.

When the viewer first sees this image, the music becomes much thicker and much warmer.  This moment is one of my favorite, as the breathtaking visual is enriched by sound for an instant of pure aesthetic bliss.  As Tomas approaches the Tree, the music drops away.  As he drinks the sap of the tree, the music does crescendo.  I won’t spoil this part of the plot, but after Tomas drinks the sap, the music falls away, and the film makes an amazing cut back to 25oo, with Tom, enclosed in a miniature bubble, approaching the star which lies at the heart of Xibalba. Oh, and did I mention the star was dying?  So, as the star prepares to supernova, Tom replaces his wedding ring on his finger.  Drums get added to the sound here, which has an ascendant feel to it.  Tom watches as the star suddenly shrinks to a pinpoint of light.  The music disappears too. After a moment of silence and darkness, a simultaneous explosion of sound and light shows the supernova.  As Tom dies in the explosion, the light showers down on the Dead Tree of Life, reviving it. For me, the beauty of this moment really is beyond words:

The Fountain stands(I think) as a great example of visuals and music reinforcing each other through film.  The movie wouldn’t be nearly as good without this soundtrack, and the music, which draws mainly from a few leitmotifs, isn’t as good without the accompanying visuals.  In its perfect marriage of visual and auditory input, The Fountain is a truly overwhelming aesthetic experience.  Though I could go on for pages writing about other aspects of The Founain, I conclude this post here.

When I said in class that I found DW 2 to be unpleasant, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.  The music, I found, was nearly omnipresent.  It could not be ignored, and thus, the weird, pavlovian voice that tried to brainwash you with Deluzian philosophy could not be ignored.  I felt just like Alex from A Clockwork Orange when I listened to this piece.  The music held me down while the voice fiddled with my brain(figuratively of course).  So, I found this music to be a wholly unpleasant experience, but not necessarily a bad one.
The best way I can describe my reaction is through a film I recently saw, called Lunacy.  In the beginning of the film the director stated, “Ladies and Gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film, with all the degeneracy peculiar to that job. It is not a work of art.”  Without going into details, the film didn’t have a particularly artistic feel to it.  It too was a rather unpleasant experience.  In fact, my reactions to this film and this piece of music were pretty much the same.  I don’t think unpleasantness is a bad thing in art, so, when I say DW2 was unpleasant, I mean it as a compliment.

The first time I listened to Dark Waves 2 the piece totally defeated me.  There are so many layers to sift through that every time I honed in on one, I’d resurface later to find that everything around it had changed.  I ended up splitting this piece into three parts.  The first, lasting until about 3:00, gradually builds up to a climax, becoming thicker and thicker through the addition of voices to the sound, each one seeming sharper than the last.  At the end the sound flattens, paving the way for a new pattern, which lasts until 7:00.  The underlying sound of the first section gradually builds during the second, but a rippling pattern of notes is superimposed on the image, cutting through the darker sound of the lower register. During the end of the piece, the lower register fades in and out much faster than before.  The rippling patterns also seem more rounded, as opposed to the sharp sound they had earlier in the piece.  The electronic buzzes which permeate the piece seem all the more present during the end. Overall, I didn’t find the piece to be “Dark” or threatening in the sense of say, Uaxuctum.  I thought the underlying sonorities had a sort of warmth to them, which was cut by the cold, rippling patterns in the higher register.

Listening to Uaxuctum for the first time I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was too young to appreciate the film, but old enough to not be easily frightened by a movie.  That said, I remember being terrified during the first monolith scenes. There was something dark and inscrutable about the artifact that was amplified by Ligeti’s Requiem to frightening proportions. That same presence seemed to crystallize itself in Uaxuctum.  The latter half of the movement in particular used this weird sound, almost like a synthesized scream or cry, which represented its prophetic character. Contrary to my initial reaction to the monolith, I found Uaxuctum to be beautiful.  Knowing that it represents a Mayan city that destroyed itself, I find a sort of natural beauty in this piece, as if it represented a cycle of death and rebirth.  I get a similar feeling listening Ko-Tha, another of Scelsi’s pieces, which, conveniently, deals with Shiva.

Of all the music that we have listened to in class thus far, I can say, without any doubt, that Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet affected me the most.  I confess that I had very low expectations going into this piece.  When professor Alegant said in class that it was over an hour and used a tape loop of a tramp singing, I braced myself for the worst.  After listening to Come Out and I am sitting in a room, both of which I did enjoy, for the record, I was tired of lengthy, experimental pieces involving the musicality of the human voice.  I was scared it would simply reiterate this idea with some sort of twist.  The thought that Bryars had selfishly not given back to the Tramp also occurred to me.
When I listened to the piece it completely blew me away. The second movement had the deepest effect on me.  It had that great quality of being overwhelmingly sad and yet not depressing.  It made me feel sad for the tramp and for society in general, not for myself.  After listening to the piece, I cannot believe that it was conceived from selfishness, vanity, or sarcasm. I think that the creator put real feeling and emotion into this piece. The orchestrations did not mock or patronize the tramp, they sympathized with him.
Someone in class said that music like this captured a piece of the soul.  I don’t think it was only the tramp’s soul.  I have no experience in musical composition, but I do have experience in the visual arts, and I think it is extremely difficult to show that much of yourself in a work of art.  I believe that Bryars was being completely honest in this work.  For me, this music is a pure expression of human sadness, not sarcasm, and not self-indulgence.

I know in some of my past posts and writings, I’ve had some problems with continuums.  A lot of times I just assume that they are implied, that shades of gray are taken for granted.  There is no continuum, or not for me at least, when it comes to minimalism.  Some pieces, like “Piano Phase” and “In C”, just do it for me.  They give me a clear feeling or emotion, and I can sit back and lose myself in the music.  Other pieces, like “Coming Together”, I experience as a musical version of the Chinese Water Torture.  The repetitiveness gets annoying and I have to try to ignore the music to listen to it.  Everything minimalist I have listened to thus far seems to be hit or miss, and I think it takes real talent to hit, to take a simple pattern and make a work of art.  For minimalism-lovers, or critics of my opinion, I will refer you to three well- known minimalist works, being “I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves”, “99 bottles of beer on the wall” and “The song that never ends”, for an idea of how minimalism can grate on one’s nerves.  Of course these songs are a blast if you’re the one singing them, but highly irritating if you’re not in the mood for it.  I’m sure minimalism is fun to perform, and can definitely succeed, as with “In C”, but it sometimes doesn’t translate to me as a listener.

Triadic Iteration Lattices is one of those great examples of when music can be found in a seemingly unlikely source.  This past weekend, Barrows had a false fire alarm.  Walking through the building to the outside, I noticed that each alarm hovered around the same pitch, but they were all slightly off when compared to each other, creating a scelsi-esque drone.  Triadic iteration lattices reminded me of this effect.  This is a piece that expands the definition of music, forcing you to consider sources that you would have never considered before.  It may seem unlikely to find music in air sirens, but this piece shows us that we are likely to find music everywhere we look if we try hard enough.

In my blog I wanted to clarify my feelings about Niblock’s Kontradictionaries and the statement I made about it in class on Monday.  In class I said something along the lines of, “I could only appreciate Kontradictionaries on an intellectual level, and not on an emotional level.”  I take Kontradictionaries as something of an essay on overtones.  I was inexperienced in overtones coming into class on Monday, so listening to Kontradictionaries opened my ears to things I had never heard before.  Compared to Stimmung, the Niblock Piece demonstrated overtones in a much more explicit fashion.  As I said before, it was a musical essay, an experiment, on overtones.  When I listened to Kontradictionaries, it provoked an intellectual response in me, an enlightenment, one might say.  Stimmung produced a more emotional response in me because it put the overtones Kontradictionaries had experimented with to a more emotionally artistic purpose.  In that way, I could, as I said in class, listen to Stimmung simply for the joy and pleasure of listening to it, because emotion never gets old; it never exhausts itself.  You can’t get tired of feeling an emotion like you can get tired of having an intellectual idea stated. I couldn’t listen to Kontradictionaries again, simply for the joy of listening to it, because its potential to enlighten is spent.  You can’t be enlightened about something twice.  So, to summarize and further clarify my thoughts, Kontradictionaries was intellectual art, which, for me at least, has limited appeal, and Stimmung was emotional art, which is timeless.