So it seems like most of these blogs are focusing on our listening session and all the new stuff, so I figured I’d offer my reactions as well. As interesting as drones were, it’s nice to be moving on. And minimalism seems to be easier to get used to than, say, Niblock. ”In C” was interesting, but I didn’t love it. My favorite part of the class was listening to the pieces Matt and Andrew brought in. I especially loved Andrew’s just because I love both strange expressive altered instuments and crazy cover songs. It was fun to see the reactions around the room as everyone realized what song was playing. I felt that the trumpeter was amazing, and his use of the effects was spot on. I think a lot of times musicians tend to get caught up in their effects and let them sound cool for them, but this guy was amazing. And the rest of the band too… That whole show just sounded like so much damn fun. Also the way Radiohead seemed to be so influenced by minimalism was kind of astounding, and I really thought it was kinda spooky how it came on shuffle right after “In C”…. Now I guess we’ll just have to see what else minimalism brings to us
We are out of drones.( Finally )
I didn’t realize how much effort listening to Merbow’s and Niblock’s pieces required until I heard In C. Like Caroline said, we could ” sit back and let it come to us”. It isn’t that I hate Merzbow’s or Niblock’s pieces that much, I have already had some enjoyments in listening to these two composers’ pieces,especially Merzbow’s. Merzbow’s music provides such a dynamic nature that, if I try hard enough, I can catch up with it and feel the form and emotions in it. Niblock’s music as well gives people the sense of “moving the cloud with sound with manipulations”. But instead of the pieces themselves, the listening experience is the source we gain enjoyment from.
However, the whole thing changes for In C. The piece is dynamic yet has a strong sense of form. For the first version that we listened to, the piano in the background provided a ”ground” where the whole piece grows from. Every instrument starts at the same “root” and began to grow in a random way.It feels just like watching a flower growing in the spring.Shoots, offshots, buds and gradually they (will) blossom.Although it seems that every instrument moves in a random way, I still think the arrangement of the piece is brilliant. During the piece, I can always feel that there’s some background sounds (like violins play a continuous note for 8 beats or so) and figure sounds(like those lively and short vocal vowels or percussions). I would say that different versions are just the same flower grown from different seeds in the same variety. But still, as minimalism, it doesn’t have that much emotional content, or to say that the emotional content differs from person to person. There’s thousands of ways to perceive the piece for emotions. However, the experience of our listening while trying to find where the instruments have gone is great.
By the way, there are two things that I find interesting.
First, after listening to drones, does anybody get the special yet so good feeling of the environment around us? (such as the crack of the chair?)
Second, does the content seem to be different when we write when listening to the piece from write without listening?
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 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.
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