I love a bit of animation, especially when it is done cleverly and done well.
As much as I love it, I don't have the time or the skills to do animation.
Besides that, when you see it done as well as the Mystery Guitar Man does it on his YouTube channel, it just makes me want to concentrate on what I do best: admiring from a distance and alerting people like you to these things via this web page.
This is a Mozart piece, "The Marriage of Figaro", done completely in stop-motion animation. Short frames, most likely of one note, looped and edited together to make this piece. Each guitar line has been edited in this way and then played back over each other, multi-track style making a piece that is as eerie as it is mindblowing.
Take a listen: Mozart as only you'd hear it in the 21st Century.
Thanks to the Mystery Guitar Man. You can see more of his videos here, on his YouTube Channel.
Showing posts with label Classical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Classical. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 May 2014
Monday, 8 April 2013
Pathways into Classical Music Appreciation
or
How a awkward kid from an Australian semi-rural cultural back-water became all musically literate and edificated...
... or some crap like that...
People ask me frequently how I manage to listen to all kinds of varied music. I listen to everything from Renaissance-era Lute music through to hardcore punk, and all points in between. For some people, that's too broad a scope and it is beyond comprehension for them. I guess it all depends on the way it is introduced to you and the way you approach it in the first place.
For most people, and I was no different, they are introduced to this stuff in junior high school music. "This is what classical music is, now sit there and appreciate it." Others learn instruments and learn to play classical-era pieces at the expense of anything modern. This could go part of the way to explaining why we tend to hate it so much - we didn't come to the music on our own terms.
My psych lecturer at university explained a method of learning new information:
This explains how I managed to get into classical music: some of the bands I knew and loved as a kid were trying out new things that just happened to be classical ideas.
For example:
Other initial contacts with classical music include the Warner Brothers classic cartoons where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd parodied Rossini's "The Barber of Seville", and where they condensed 19 hours of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nebelung" down to just seven minutes.
Of course, some of the musicians I loved also happened to be classically trained: Yngwie Malmsteen and Randy Rhoads (who played on Ozzy Osbourne's first two solo albums) for instance.
It wasn't until I heard a piece of music by a person named Walter Carlos (now Wendy Carlos) entitled "Country Lane" that blew my mind. "Country Lane" was part of the soundtrack of "A Clockwork Orange" and it was a very early synthesizer work. Its ever-changing key signatures, complex chords and brooding dark atmosphere just hit the spot as a precocious 15 year old.
In high school I found a pivotal record among the music resources in the form of Carlos' "Switched On Bach", which contained famous Bach pieces played exclusively on some very embryonic Moog Synthesizers. By the time I'd heard it for the first time (circa 1993), synth technology had advanced considerably, so the sounds were quite archaic. However, the beauty of the music was evident, and I heard enough of it in "Switched On Bach" to know that this was impeccably crafted music, overflowing with melody and supported by a rich tapestry of ornamentation.
The next step was to try some classical guitar albums. As a young guitarist at the time, this caught my imagination. I also listened to the Andre Segovia records that were also in the resource room and they were also fascinating. The musicianship, the complex chords, the lightening fast runs of notes; these players possessed a discipline and dedication to their instrument that far outstripped anything I was capable of.
From there I found John Williams, the Melbourne born classical guitarist, student of Segovia, who was probably the first classical guitarist to risk his career and reputation by picking up that most dreaded instrument in the eyes of classical purists: the electric guitar. Mind you, his band Sky performed a rocked up version of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" that I consider to be the definitive performance of the piece.
For a while it seemed almost everywhere I looked, classical influences were being integrated everywhere. The sportman's favourite theme music "Fanfare for the Common Man" was a trumpet fanfare written by composer Aaron Copeland, rocked up by Emerson Lake and Palmer. Electric Light Orchestra grafted a chamber string quartet onto a traditionally-configured rock band. Frank Zappa idolised Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varese, and Frank was always incorporating some of the stranger, more avant garde aspects of their work into his own increasingly complex compositions.
I'd purchased Zappa's "We're Only In It For The Money" in the mid 1990s on the recommendation from one of those lists of "Greatest albums of all time". For years I hated it, until I studied 20th century music as part of my degree. Listening to some of the strangest music I'd ever heard in that class, and hearing works by his inspirations suddenly made Zappa's more esoteric work (such as this one) make sense.
Hearing Scheonberg's serialist piano works can be quite painful at times, but after hearing them, I now know why David Bowie was inspired by them. For years I hated the piano solo in "Alladin Sane". However, the song is about his mentally-ill half brother, and by adding a bizarre atonal, arhythmic piano solo of this nature to the song was actually a stroke of genius. After all, the title "Alladin Sane" is a pun on "A Lad Insane"...
20th Century music was the greatest liberating factor for me as a composer, as it meant that one could take the traditional music rule book and torch it with a flame thrower. Rules, syntax, constructs didn't matter anymore. You could write your own rules. That's one of the reasons that some of the most ugly, difficult sounding music (as it sounds to most) is quite a thrilling listen to me, as I find it to be very free and unhinged, unbound by complex rules and traditions that may in fact hold a piece of music down or make it sound like something else.
In all of the cases cited above, all it takes is for a musician to incorporate something unusual or different into their work for one to gain exposure to a number of different styles of music, and as such, I could then go and approach this music as I felt I needed to - on it's own merits, in my own way. I didn't just believe what people told me was "good music". I didn't just assume that "I had to like it" just because someone said I did. Indeed, I probably would not have found the pieces of music that a music teacher would recommend a student should listen to, but that's precisely the point: From the massively green field of classical music, I've managed to cultivate my own, if strangely manicured, patch within it.
Everyone has their own story to tell, and not everybody would follow the same path to discovering music as I have. Tell me about yours in the comments below.
And as much as I love Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", I still can't stand Romantic-period Opera!
How a awkward kid from an Australian semi-rural cultural back-water became all musically literate and edificated...
... or some crap like that...
People ask me frequently how I manage to listen to all kinds of varied music. I listen to everything from Renaissance-era Lute music through to hardcore punk, and all points in between. For some people, that's too broad a scope and it is beyond comprehension for them. I guess it all depends on the way it is introduced to you and the way you approach it in the first place.
For most people, and I was no different, they are introduced to this stuff in junior high school music. "This is what classical music is, now sit there and appreciate it." Others learn instruments and learn to play classical-era pieces at the expense of anything modern. This could go part of the way to explaining why we tend to hate it so much - we didn't come to the music on our own terms.
My psych lecturer at university explained a method of learning new information:
- take in new information,
- how does this new information relate to information I already know?
- how can I use this information in the future?
This explains how I managed to get into classical music: some of the bands I knew and loved as a kid were trying out new things that just happened to be classical ideas.
For example:
- "Jesus Christ Superstar" and The Who's "Tommy" were operas, albeit with rock instruments.
- The Beatles used 19th-century chamber quartet-style arrangements on songs like "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby".
- They also cribbed a short burst of melody from one of Bach's "Brandenburg" concertos for the trumpet solo in "Penny Lane".
- My dad played a lot of Neil Diamond around the house, so I was unwittingly exposed to Mozart via "Song Sung Blue".
Other initial contacts with classical music include the Warner Brothers classic cartoons where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd parodied Rossini's "The Barber of Seville", and where they condensed 19 hours of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nebelung" down to just seven minutes.
Of course, some of the musicians I loved also happened to be classically trained: Yngwie Malmsteen and Randy Rhoads (who played on Ozzy Osbourne's first two solo albums) for instance.
It wasn't until I heard a piece of music by a person named Walter Carlos (now Wendy Carlos) entitled "Country Lane" that blew my mind. "Country Lane" was part of the soundtrack of "A Clockwork Orange" and it was a very early synthesizer work. Its ever-changing key signatures, complex chords and brooding dark atmosphere just hit the spot as a precocious 15 year old.
In high school I found a pivotal record among the music resources in the form of Carlos' "Switched On Bach", which contained famous Bach pieces played exclusively on some very embryonic Moog Synthesizers. By the time I'd heard it for the first time (circa 1993), synth technology had advanced considerably, so the sounds were quite archaic. However, the beauty of the music was evident, and I heard enough of it in "Switched On Bach" to know that this was impeccably crafted music, overflowing with melody and supported by a rich tapestry of ornamentation.
The next step was to try some classical guitar albums. As a young guitarist at the time, this caught my imagination. I also listened to the Andre Segovia records that were also in the resource room and they were also fascinating. The musicianship, the complex chords, the lightening fast runs of notes; these players possessed a discipline and dedication to their instrument that far outstripped anything I was capable of.
From there I found John Williams, the Melbourne born classical guitarist, student of Segovia, who was probably the first classical guitarist to risk his career and reputation by picking up that most dreaded instrument in the eyes of classical purists: the electric guitar. Mind you, his band Sky performed a rocked up version of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" that I consider to be the definitive performance of the piece.
For a while it seemed almost everywhere I looked, classical influences were being integrated everywhere. The sportman's favourite theme music "Fanfare for the Common Man" was a trumpet fanfare written by composer Aaron Copeland, rocked up by Emerson Lake and Palmer. Electric Light Orchestra grafted a chamber string quartet onto a traditionally-configured rock band. Frank Zappa idolised Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varese, and Frank was always incorporating some of the stranger, more avant garde aspects of their work into his own increasingly complex compositions.
I'd purchased Zappa's "We're Only In It For The Money" in the mid 1990s on the recommendation from one of those lists of "Greatest albums of all time". For years I hated it, until I studied 20th century music as part of my degree. Listening to some of the strangest music I'd ever heard in that class, and hearing works by his inspirations suddenly made Zappa's more esoteric work (such as this one) make sense.
Hearing Scheonberg's serialist piano works can be quite painful at times, but after hearing them, I now know why David Bowie was inspired by them. For years I hated the piano solo in "Alladin Sane". However, the song is about his mentally-ill half brother, and by adding a bizarre atonal, arhythmic piano solo of this nature to the song was actually a stroke of genius. After all, the title "Alladin Sane" is a pun on "A Lad Insane"...
20th Century music was the greatest liberating factor for me as a composer, as it meant that one could take the traditional music rule book and torch it with a flame thrower. Rules, syntax, constructs didn't matter anymore. You could write your own rules. That's one of the reasons that some of the most ugly, difficult sounding music (as it sounds to most) is quite a thrilling listen to me, as I find it to be very free and unhinged, unbound by complex rules and traditions that may in fact hold a piece of music down or make it sound like something else.
In all of the cases cited above, all it takes is for a musician to incorporate something unusual or different into their work for one to gain exposure to a number of different styles of music, and as such, I could then go and approach this music as I felt I needed to - on it's own merits, in my own way. I didn't just believe what people told me was "good music". I didn't just assume that "I had to like it" just because someone said I did. Indeed, I probably would not have found the pieces of music that a music teacher would recommend a student should listen to, but that's precisely the point: From the massively green field of classical music, I've managed to cultivate my own, if strangely manicured, patch within it.
Everyone has their own story to tell, and not everybody would follow the same path to discovering music as I have. Tell me about yours in the comments below.
And as much as I love Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", I still can't stand Romantic-period Opera!
Monday, 18 February 2013
RIPs today
It's been a big day for musicians passing today.
In the news today there were no less than four musicians who have shuffled off the mortal coil. Let's a take a look at the recent acts at The Great Gig In The Sky:
Tony was a musician in the red-light district of Hanburg in the 1960s. He took a young group from Liverpool under his wing by the name of The (Silver) Beatles) and they played many shows together. They even recorded an LP under the auspices of Bert Kaempfert, of all people. Their first single together, "My Bonnie" was the record that piqued the interest of one Brian Epstein, and the rest, as they say, is history...
Tony didn't live to have anywhere near the success as his proteges did. Nonetheless, he will be missed...
Shadow Morton was a record producer who originally discovered the Shangri-Las and produced their hit records "Leader of the Pack" and "Remember (Walking In The Sand)". He also produced the first Vanilla Fudge LP and allegedly produced Iron Butterfly's epic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
Mindy McCready was a Nashville-country startlet who has had a reasonably successful career until now. Her husband had only died a few weeks before now and she had found this extremely traumatic. She has had two previous suicide attempts and today, unfortunately it looks like she was successful - authorities believe her gunshot would was self inflicted. A very tragic story. She was 37.
Kevin Peek was an Australian session guitarist and a member of Classical/Rock fusion band Sky. He played on sessions for Manfred Mann and T.Rex before becoming a member of Cliff Richard's touring band. His greatest success was with Sky, however he always seemed to play second fiddle to the main star of the band, guitarist John Williams. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information around about the cause of his death but according to the Noise11 website it was cancer.
Sky's rocked up version of Bach's "Toccata an Fugue In D Minor" is, in my view, the definitive version of the song. Have a listen below.
May all the above rest in peace.
In the news today there were no less than four musicians who have shuffled off the mortal coil. Let's a take a look at the recent acts at The Great Gig In The Sky:
Tony Sheridan
Tony was a musician in the red-light district of Hanburg in the 1960s. He took a young group from Liverpool under his wing by the name of The (Silver) Beatles) and they played many shows together. They even recorded an LP under the auspices of Bert Kaempfert, of all people. Their first single together, "My Bonnie" was the record that piqued the interest of one Brian Epstein, and the rest, as they say, is history...
Tony didn't live to have anywhere near the success as his proteges did. Nonetheless, he will be missed...
Shadow Morton
Shadow Morton was a record producer who originally discovered the Shangri-Las and produced their hit records "Leader of the Pack" and "Remember (Walking In The Sand)". He also produced the first Vanilla Fudge LP and allegedly produced Iron Butterfly's epic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida".
Mindy McCready
Mindy McCready was a Nashville-country startlet who has had a reasonably successful career until now. Her husband had only died a few weeks before now and she had found this extremely traumatic. She has had two previous suicide attempts and today, unfortunately it looks like she was successful - authorities believe her gunshot would was self inflicted. A very tragic story. She was 37.
Kevin Peek
Kevin Peek was an Australian session guitarist and a member of Classical/Rock fusion band Sky. He played on sessions for Manfred Mann and T.Rex before becoming a member of Cliff Richard's touring band. His greatest success was with Sky, however he always seemed to play second fiddle to the main star of the band, guitarist John Williams. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information around about the cause of his death but according to the Noise11 website it was cancer.
Sky's rocked up version of Bach's "Toccata an Fugue In D Minor" is, in my view, the definitive version of the song. Have a listen below.
May all the above rest in peace.
Sunday, 9 December 2012
The Long Forgotten Art of the Mix Tape Pt 2
Around about the year 2000, I was signed up to a e-mailing list (remember those?) for followers of a band I liked at the time. A member of the mailing list asked for interested people to swap mix tapes with him. I took the bait and signed on, just to see what would happen.
I sent the first one to this guy. It was all Australian music - recent stuff on side A, classics on Side B. He sent one back with an interesting mix but all stuff that was being played on national station Triple J at the time. I asked a few times for feedback on the first one I sent, and about all I got in return was something like "I've heard most of those songs before. I really wanna hear some stuff that I've never heard before".
I didn't really get a feel for the kind of music this guy liked. I really wanted him to give me a clearer indication of whether he liked Side A or Side B of my original tape more, and his tape seemed fairly homogeneous in terms of style and age of music. In general, for the follow up I had very little to go on.
I decided to pick examples of music from the furthest reaches of my collection, where no two songs were alike and the genre would change rapidly from one song to the next without warning. It was designed to show off the length and breadth of my collection; to give him an example of the direction our compilation conversations could go in. What you ended up with amounts to something like "The Music Appreciation Lesson From Hell".
Starting with late 1960s funk, we went through 16th Century lute music, surf, Delta Blues, Avant-Jazz, Reggae, Hardcore Punk, Jazz Fusion, African-Funk, Indian Classical, Avant Garde Mouth Music, Prog Rock, Icy Synth explorations, Hick country, 1930s British Pop, Latin Rock and more.
I used a 120 minute cassette. I recorded all the selections to two Minidiscs (one for each side of the tape), and made the necessary fades, edits and sequence changes on the disks before recording them to tape. I carefully annotated each song in a letter and sent it off in the post....
...this was the tape that killed the deal. I never heard back from him. Either it never reached him, or he listened to it once and freaked out so badly that he would never get in touch again for fear of another insanity-laced sonic barrage. I've since lost the annotations, but I kept the Mini-discs and later, circa 2005, added bonus tracks and burnt them to CD for my own listening pleasure.
The one thing that we can be sure is that my music collection in 2000 is pretty tame compared to what it is now. Still, I think it's a pretty impressive feat to make such an eclectic collection and to have it frighten the hell out of people...well, I don't know that for sure, but it sounds good, so I'll stick to it. I'm sure Henry Rollins would approve.
Here for your appraisal is an online version of that Mix Tape.
Some tracks appear in alternate versions, such as "Survival" by Osibisa, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly and "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson. One song that originally appears on the tape "El Cielo" by Sky (The band featuring classical guitarist John Williams and Herbie Flowers) doesn't exist on any of the streaming services that I can find, so I have substituted it for a bonus track that I added to my CD copy "Kreuzspiel for Oboe, Bass Clarinet, Piano and Percussion" by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Enjoy!
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Happy 100th Birthday John Cage
John Cage is one of the musicians who has always existed on the periphery of my little musical world. It was only during university in 20th Century Art Music class that I discovered his works and just how subversive they are.
I doubt that I have ever heard a musician whose works are both inspirational, confrontational and yet repellent all at once (except maybe Captain Beefheart). His music can be challenge the way you perceive music and musical ideas, and it can also make some people want to smash things.
The word that is largely associated with him is "visionary". Indeed, he tried hard to break the mold of conventional music concepts by breaking as many rules as possible. By working in areas of sonic territory that were previously uncharted, he'd made numerous advances in musical discovery, particularly in the field of electronic music. By also adding the previously unheard of element of "chance" to musical composition, he created music that is random and never predictable.
Visionary, in the sense that he changed the way a piano sounds in order to emphasise the percussive nature of the instrument. After all, a piano has hammers that strike strings, right? But instead of it being a melodic instrument in his mind, he brought out the percussive nature of it, by altering the tones of the strings by putting erasers and nails and screws and pieces of fabric in the strings, thus disallowing the strings to "ring out" as they normally would. This he called the prepared piano.
His most notorious piece, however, was 4'33. A piece that was complete silence. A person sits at the piano, and lifts the lid, puts the lid down, lifts the lid again, and then walks off.
How stupid, I hear you say. Well, really, the jokes on you. Because, so often we listen to music to hear a tune, or a beat. We don't really listen to the sounds around us, which, when they combine and collide together, can actually make some beautiful noises. Every time 4'33 is played, the music will be different, because of the different environment you are in at the time!
He experimented with radio sounds.
He used the orchestra in unusual ways. He played 2 or more pieces together, to create a colliding soundscape that would be different every time it is played.
He really turned the music world upside down and on its head. For that I am greatful. We need more people like that to challenge the status quo of the music world.
I doubt that I have ever heard a musician whose works are both inspirational, confrontational and yet repellent all at once (except maybe Captain Beefheart). His music can be challenge the way you perceive music and musical ideas, and it can also make some people want to smash things.
The word that is largely associated with him is "visionary". Indeed, he tried hard to break the mold of conventional music concepts by breaking as many rules as possible. By working in areas of sonic territory that were previously uncharted, he'd made numerous advances in musical discovery, particularly in the field of electronic music. By also adding the previously unheard of element of "chance" to musical composition, he created music that is random and never predictable.
Visionary, in the sense that he changed the way a piano sounds in order to emphasise the percussive nature of the instrument. After all, a piano has hammers that strike strings, right? But instead of it being a melodic instrument in his mind, he brought out the percussive nature of it, by altering the tones of the strings by putting erasers and nails and screws and pieces of fabric in the strings, thus disallowing the strings to "ring out" as they normally would. This he called the prepared piano.
His most notorious piece, however, was 4'33. A piece that was complete silence. A person sits at the piano, and lifts the lid, puts the lid down, lifts the lid again, and then walks off.
How stupid, I hear you say. Well, really, the jokes on you. Because, so often we listen to music to hear a tune, or a beat. We don't really listen to the sounds around us, which, when they combine and collide together, can actually make some beautiful noises. Every time 4'33 is played, the music will be different, because of the different environment you are in at the time!
He experimented with radio sounds.
He used the orchestra in unusual ways. He played 2 or more pieces together, to create a colliding soundscape that would be different every time it is played.
He really turned the music world upside down and on its head. For that I am greatful. We need more people like that to challenge the status quo of the music world.
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