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
Hmm, I’m not entirely sure what to blog about. Monday night was probably the most diverse listening session we’ve had yet, so I’m going to cover a few different things. My ears are still trying to adjust to minimalism, so I don’t have much of a reaction right now; it feels like I’m in the middle of transitioning from deep mental listening to a kind of more physical listening. With drones, everything happens at once and the listener is presented with a complex bazillion-layer baklava of sound (mmm, baklava). I had to sift through the layers to find specific characteristics, like certain overtones and whatnot. With minimalism, the music is more sequential. All the phase shifts and patterns come to the ear instead of waiting to be found. This idea will probably change as we listen to more minimalism, though.
Besides that, I was blown away by the comparison between Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” and Reich’s “In C.” Before then I had never drawn any connections between our class music and the more mainstream music found on my playlists. Now that we’ve done so, I’ve been listening to Kid A with a completely different perspective and I definitely agree with David a few posts below mine–the amount of parallels between minimalism/drones and the album is incredible. “Treefingers” is a good example, being composed entirely of warm, ethereal drones and overtones. I keep asking myself why I didn’t notice the connections before.
Onto the “guest” pieces. The contrast between Andrew and Matt’s pieces couldn’t have been more stark, and it was a little jarring to switch from the energetic spiel at the end of the uillean pipes lament to the blaring, distorted trumpet of Andrew’s piece. Yet after I thought about it, I could see some similarities between the two. The last part of the lament was quite a surprise, considering the original nature of the piece, and I wasn’t sure how to react. It seemed surreal, almost obscenely too happy, and that quality remained and was amplified with the improv jazz piece.
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.
Maybe it’s because of the proximity of Halloween, or maybe it’s because my nerves are still jangled from watching Oberlin’s production of the bloody play Bug this past weekend, but a lot of the music we’ve been listening to lately seems to have a menacing quality. Andrew’s show-and-tell song really evoked the atmosphere of the play, for example, because it resembled the music they played before they began the show. The first blare of the trumpet was elephant-like, so I smiled and scooted down in my chair, ready for a relaxing time listening to experimental trumpeting. Well, that was what I got, but not in the way I expected. The following blare of trumpet was distorted and wild, like the kind of sound a Dr. Seuss animal would make as opposed to its real life counterparts. I could best describe the song as like a carnival fun-house for my ears…there were traces of the familiar, like one’s reflection in the mirror, hidden within the bizarre, one’s reflection stretched out in the fun house mirror, stretched fat or thin–but in this case, with a scary effect, as opposed to a funny one. The heavily distorted Hey Jude inspired chills because it took something that was so genially familiar and made me do a double-take, in a way looking at a familiar friend and realizing that they had a deeper side that apparently was under the surface the entire time, just unapparent to me. It also amazed me when Andrew said that the song was performed live–I can’t imagine the kind of improvisational skills that must have required, or if it followed a practiced score, the kind of practice and preparation that went into it. On a similar note, I had that same amazement after listening to Matt’s bagpipe piece, which was so complex. The beautiful, pure tones that instrument produced would be worth claiming “I listen to bagpipes” just to hear it. That song also had a sort of twist, a musical equivalent of a poem’s turn. While the mournful, saxophone-resembling melody seemed to represent the Irish family’s struggle and pain, the too-cheerful portion at the end was when I felt that the family had finally died, releasing their earthly suffering in a vulgarly celebratory uproar, because death isn’t “supposed” to be so happy. I was really happy that Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place was the closing piece to our class. For once during those two hours, I felt as though everything was in its right place…here was a beloved, familiar song, straightforward and just as how I remembered it.
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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