Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

While listening to the FYSP ipod on shuffle, “I am sitting in a room alone” came about. For some reason i began to fast forward through the song by way of holding down the “next track” button. It caused the song to fast forward in quick skips, and the time between these skips snowballed. The funny thing was, eventually the skips had no seams, it was one. It was still being fast forwarded but I couldn’t tell if I didn’t know I was listening. I just think that it was interesting.

I’ve recently been taking life as a song, and listening to all noises as if they were something that I objectively chose to play. Strangely things have pulse. The library today began to buzz together. There was literally rhythm during some moments, when all the babbling pooled together to create a type of song. Sighs, beeps, typing, small talk, shuffling, sneezes, laughter, feet tapping, the copy machine. Strangely all these things blended into one another. In my active listening my ears began to perk, when I’d hear something faint in the distance my ears would try to hone in on that sound. I never realized how much things reverberate, often I would stop paying attention to a sound as soon as my brain understood what the sound was trying to communicate to me, however noise continues far beyond the initial reaction that caused it. Echoes are amazing, and are absolutely everywhere, even if they only show up for a microscopic chunk of a second.

Don’t even get me started on trying to sleep. The hum of the radiator; immediately my mind makes a major third above the constant pitch of that, and I can’t turn it off. It’s fun to vocally improvise over the sound of a computer buzzing, or the trash truck reversing into the alley behind my dorm room. The Garbage truck is especially interesting. Not only does it succesfully wake me up every morning at six A.M., but when my mind begins to harmonize with it, the dopplar effect screws with me. But actually sounds awesome. I’ll sing a harmonic pitch above it, and then as the truck gets closer the sound will change into dissonance, and often again back into a separate harmony.

Often I think that in the music world, originality doesn’t matter. Every thought that is or will ever be is up there floating in the atmosphere, already created and alive. We as humans have the ability to tune into this and find something. Some of these ideas are easier to come by than others. When we allow ourselves to inhale everything, unfiltered, that is when we have the capacity gain meaning in music on a deeper level. I dont know if I have entered that place, I may find it soon, I may find it never, but hopefully i’m on my way.

Alright. Rolling stone just came out with the 100 greatest singers ever.

Bob Dylan was number seven,  beating people like Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Bono(fair), Steve Perry, James Brown, Stevie Wonder.

Fine Bob Dylan was the man and all. Yeah, yeah he was an inspiration. Yeah he was the omnipotent folk god for millions of people. But he wasn’t that fucking fantastic at singing. I mean yes. Great musicians deserve praise, but not in every single category of musicianship. (unless they do deserve it). Say what you will about his voice, make any argument that makes sense. But I still wont believe that there are no less then six people better at singing then him.

Screw you Rolling Stone magazine. Screw you.

Ever heard of Luciano Pavoratti?

Okay come on. Isn’t Opera supposed to be this huge high class snobby high-brow Fest? Where there are Fat sopranos and Fat tenors and everyone is fat and singing these notes that don’t really exist in the human range of singing but somehow are available to these few people. There’s supposed to be tragedy of epic proportions, mostly dealing with love and how awesome love is even though in order to truly get the princess you have to prove something.

Then there is Lang. proof that we live in “modern times.” Alegant said that he composes his Operas mostly to produce C.D.’s I believe that his Operas would be much better in person. I couldn’t imagine what the acting slash set and costume design would look like on one of these things. When the lyrics to one of the songs is completely made up and incomprehensible, how is one to understand the meaning of the Opera, or the plot. Or does it not matter. I for one know that any opera that I have seen, even if I did understand the language it was in, I still couldn’t tell what the F they  were saying. But still, there is plot in lyrics, and emotions that ties in to the Opera as a whole. Where is that in Langs pieces? I would love to see one of his Operas live, in a serious context. However If I were to stumble upon one of his Operas without knowing his music before, I would probably feel ripped off out of however many hundred Euros it would cost. I would say “Is this guy standing in the back laughing his ass off that people actually paid to see this thing?” I wonder why it hasn’t come to America yet. I mean, were so used to crap these days–broadway now runs Legally blonde the musical, and also Shrek the musical, not to mention half of the Broadway Phantom of the Opera show is pre-recorded–couldn’t we tolerate something quirky and intellectual? What would the American reaction to Lang be? Maybe he should just stay in Vienna where his ancestors are.

I must say that I truly enjoyed listening to JLA last weekend. For some reason I found his music incredibly deep and inspiring. In reading about him I learned about the influence his home in Alaska has on him. I could really see the frozen tundra of the north shining through some of his pieces. I saw this especially in “The Light That Fills the World.” The swirling drones of the higher registers combined with the rumbling bass created this very astral effect on me. It was a strange feeling that started in my hands and then kindof shook my body. In listening I could see myself watching something so naturally bazzar (however that’s spelled) as the Aurora Borealis. Which in itself connected with this song. There are all these high colors swirling in lines together creating this great painting in the sky, which is exactly what “The Light That Fills the World” did to me. I could hear all these colors combining and spackling together, as if I could actually see them. The ending of the piece was perfect. There is a slight climax of the deep rumbling of the bass, with the raindrops of the xylophonie instrument and the higher strings, that forced themselves upon each other, and then slowly peeled themselves off one by one as if it hurt a little animal. And that little animal is all that is left, whimpering away until the song ends. That one note sounded so perfect and crisp once it was left alone from all the other things that were piled on top of it.

In critique of the piece I must say it often became repetitive, repeating similar sections over again. Low bass rumbling, with some added higher drones followed by the wobbly jingles then change. Yes they were all slightly different than previous sections, but in terms of format these parts were often repeated one after another. However, it seemed to work out pretty well.

I enjoyed the wide variety of songs that Chris chose to play for us on monday. Monday night I went out into the Lorain county farm and amish country and slaughtered some goats… Atleast I think, I was in a trance. It must have been the Five string blues that made me do it. But seriously, I respect norweigans for their forms of expression, we all have a spiky shrieking side that needs to come out every once in a while, they are just more comfortable about it I suppose. Like “look at how badass they are.” Maybe they aren’t messed up, maybe they are normal and the rest of us are weird. Who knows?

“Five String Blues,” Was good to hear at first, but it was complemented by Doug’s comments about the blues form, I think that made me appreciate it more. The rock solo, I mean if you can’t respect that shredding ability you must be some bitter 70-year-old who thinks that the young people have too much freedom, and that flappers should come back. I appreciated the obscurity and the perfectly executed rhythmic stops in the first heavy song we listened to, however I didn’t enjoy it necessarily. I would listen to it yes, many times, but it wouldn’t make my favorite songs list.

Uaxuctum: scary and beautiful. I think it’s because mystery and fear both are beautiful. We all love the sense of adventure, and “scary” songs like this make us think of places that would make our hearts beat fast, and make us feel alive. I like how this piece got my adrenaline going a little bit. I could see this whole world inside this piece that was full of fantasy. The quick changes allowed me to never get comfortable with a phrase of the song, it always kept going following that mystery. It was certainly a listening voyage that went somewhere dark and completely unknown. probably with ghosts.

I would like to concede my original thoughts about the Tramp. First I believed that Bryers was using the Tramp to his advantage because he was dry on ideas for a song. After Bryers created a successful song, he didn’t give any credit to the tramp himself, who was the overall melody and obviously most important part of the song itself. However listening to the song itself, it mostly became beautiful when the orchestra came in and gave it life. It’s hard to keep the same line interesting for an hour, Bryers beautiful accompainment gave life to the tramps song. The tramp receives acknowledgement through the title, and the description of the piece. He is not entirely forgotten. The fact that his song and emotion would inspire someone to write a symphony behind it is indeed a great form of praise to the tramp. I did feel however, that adding a famous and flourishing musician like Tom Waits, was a negative addition to the song. Here we have someone who is indeed living a cold and sad life as a homeless person, singing his little sparks of hope through song, and a rich musician who is trying to copy that emotion on top of it. To me it is a mockery of the tramps life itself. Here we are mixing real emotion with an actor trying to express that emotion in a harmony. Although they both sound dirty and poor, the idea of it just makes the final movement clash. The first movements were so powerful and expressive, I was disappointed when the Tom Waits came in.

Maybe i

I was upset that Sirens ended up not being on the iPod, because I was curious to listen to it again and play with the climaxes and such, however it wasn’t so my plan ended up being screwed. The thing I liked about “Q” the most was that aching feeling of constant battery. The tones just kept pumping themselves onto me creating this dry and harsh physical effect. For most of the piece I couldn’t tell the difference between the oscillators and the instruments. Somehow it became neither mechanical nor acoustic, it was just one big wall of sound so to speak.

I never realized how picky sound can get. Why is it that western cultural music was designed around half steps, when there is so much more between them? Most people can’t even tell the difference, and lots of people can’t even hear a half step. Who’s idea was it to design sound in this way? Was there some big ancient gathering where musicians got together and created this criteria? There’s so much more to sound than we could possibly even imagine. I mean low bass notes can kill people!!! what the hell man? Why are there a million different ways to produce a song, and yet the majority of popular music boils down to songs that only go as far as 3-chords?

Basically all my ramblin’ boils down to this: I don’t understand how this whole sound thing works. I think there are very few people who truly do. But we all love it, so somethings going right.

Sorry,

-Jackson Meredith

although I preferred atmospheres to Lontano, I appreciated many of the aspects of the latter. First of all I love how simply it begins, and how subtle it moves into dissonance with the addition of instruments. Later at around 3:00 the tension builds up to a climax before the piece creates a non classical ambience. Right there around 3:00, with the high pitched frequencys, followed by a few low brassy notes, I felt like I was watching the matrix, or some other sort of movie, but I could definately see this being the soundtrack for some film. Maybe one day when I’m a big shot movie director I will use this in a scene. (just kidding). When the piece reached eight minutes, I got the feeling like I should be watching some trippy 60’s physics or astrononomy video. Some old guy would be saying in a crackly voice “look to the stars,” and it would definately be still on VHS. I noticed in Lontano, at 8:30 you can hear a voice taking a breath. I wonder if that was purposeful or just a happening of the recording. Also ten seconds before that, you can barely hear the creaking of wood, maybe chairs. I know that those occurences aren’t relevent to the piece as a whole, but I just thought it was interesting. Atmospheres is intense.