Re: OT: Musical languistics

--- Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "James Worlton" <jamesworlton@...>
>
>
> > > To my ears the "experimental" music is
> > > vile noise.  I prefer almost anything but that
> > > Zairean
> > > stuff.
>
> I don't know what Zairean means.

It means from Zaire, the huge country that once
existed in the heart of central Africa, but has now
reverted to its early post-independence name
Democratic Republic of Congo so that we may be
thoroughly confused trying to keep it seperate from
its smaller northen neighbor Republic of Congo.

How would you,
> Adam, react to Chick Corea,
> for instance, especially his "Children's Songs"?
I'm unfamiliar with Corea.

Or
> Stravinsky, or even
> Philip Glass?

I'm not sure who Glass is.  I've heard the name
before, but can't remember the music.  Stravisky is
good, but not among my favorites.


I find these composers structured,
> intense, and dark.  I
> like a lot of the minimalists.  What I guess I don't
> care for--and this is
> the 'non-musician' in me speaking--are pieces that
> violate expected rhythmic
> patterns; I can't name any composers, James could,
> but those pieces where
> someone pings here, then silence, then a couple of
> drum rolls, then
> silence, then a crash of symbols, silence, then
> rowing on the strings, and
> another isolated ping... I find myself writhing in
> my seat.  Give me the
> dissonant, vile noise, so long as their is a
> building energy in it!
Well, this is actually part of what I was calling vile
noise.  There is no unifying structure and expresses
nothing more than the "composer's" desire to use as
many sheets of paper as possible while composing his
"score".  Dissonance has it's uses.  I *don't* want to
listen to an entire symphony of dissonance, though.
It's like a spice.  I like dozens upon dozens of
different spices.  My kitchen overflows with them.  I
love to comine multitudes of them in a single dish in
surprising ways.  But there's no way I'd try to eat a
platefull of spices.  They're extras for enhancing the
dish; they aren't the dish.

> Onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree of
> "Einstein on the Beach."
> The frenzy of Song number 9 in Corea.
>
>
> I think I like least of all the "generic" classical
> music, the 'warmed over
> sentimentality' as you call it, which is especially
> evident in our
> commonplace film soundtracks.
There's plenty of eminently forgetable stuff done for
sound tracks, but as you said below there has also
been some great stuff done for movie scores.

The music that's
> supposed to tell us how
> we're supposed to feel.  But there are notable
> exceptions!  Jarre's score in
> "Witness."  Williams, who has composed so many fine
> scores for movies.
Williams is probably my second favorite 20th c.
composer.  Another example of good movie music was
that composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su for The
Last Emperor.  It did a good job of translating
Chinese musical traditions into a Western symphonic
form that would be suitable for the movie and its
audience by bridging the gap between two disperate
traditions.

> Woycech Kilar's score for "Bram Stoker's Dracula"!!!
>  I would also count
> among my very favorite classical composers Albert
> Roussell, writing for Lily
> Laskine (I can't remember if he is late
> nineteenth-century or early
> twentieth), but "Impromptu," pour l'harpe, which I
> transposed to the piano
> when I was twenty and played pretty competently
> once, has a fury and an
> intensity that I like in much unusual classical
> music--full as it is of
> unexpected chord combinations and melodic
> progressions, and constant
> accidence.
>
> Sally Caves
I love the baroque period and the Slavic Romantics.
And taste changes over time.  I used to dispise Chopin
as some of the most repulsive stuff ever composed.
Now I sorta like him.  I'm thinking it's time to give
Sibelius another try.

Adam

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