A smorgasboard of thoughts

Sound Unbound - Chapter 1 - Steve Reich

The chapter in and of itself was Steve Reich basically giving his career in review, but what I found most interesting about his career was that he seemed to take the concept of the voice as an instrument seriously. I had heard of "the voice as an instrument" before, especially as I have actually taken voice lessons. Yet the way he used voices was totally unique. Starting in his early career when he was interesting in phasing them, and then latter when he composed pieces such as Different Trains and used speech as melody. Aside from sounding interesting it added a more tangible historical component to the piece. Another piece that I found interesting where he did something similar was "Three Tales" which he did with Beryl Korot where he used interviews as the libretto. Of course all of this stems from the concept of sampling as instrumentation, and of course that sampling is not just limited to voice. One final point I thought interesting was that he didn't like synths.

Morton Feldmen

As I read through the article I discovered on Morton Feldman I felt one of the things I recognized most was that "Morton Feldmen was a friend of John Cage".

After learning such standard facts, such Jan. 12th birth in Brooklyn in 1986, I inevitably decided to let his music do the talking for him and decided to listen to "Rothko Chapel". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxSt_w2ODaQ

The initial violin certainly grabbed my attention, but I believe it was some of the initial intermitten sounds that I found difficult to identify that made it eerie to me. Then of course when the voices came in their "unique dissonance" only added to the effect. If found it interesting how majority of the time there was only one instrument playing and he seemed to initial use single instruments at a time to promote "the building effect" in the music, then finally mixed them.

One of the comments posted on the wall of the video was "listen to this in the dark". Seeing as I can be skittish that is certainly something I will not be doing ;however, I think if I were ever to make some sort of avant-garde haunted house and throw in Jean Cocteau and Mozart this music would definitely be playing.

Plunderphonics: Because "A good composer does not imitate, he steals"

In the essay Plunderphonics by John Oswald he discusses the way in which music is imitated, borrowed and "stolen". For example, he mentions how singers with original are often trying to imitate Bruce Springsteen's sound as opposed to studying his melodic contours. He brings up the "right of integrity" in relation to Canadian copyright law, and the however author can protect a work from particular distortion. However in my mind the most pivotal and interesting comment he makes in the entire article comes at the end where he states "All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in the public domain. It's a statement that I feel less compelled to write about, and more compelled to go play with and test out.

Some Supplemental thoughts on Harmonics

When searching for information about Harmonics I found multiple definitions of what exactly Harmonics is; however, in the end I found this article which related to Sympathetic Vibratory Physics more interesting http://www.svpvril.com/musicuni.html.

The article seems to be a mix of the spiritual and scientific, and contains statements such as "there is no such thing as chaos in the universe"

What is has to say in terms of Harmonics, including concepts such as 512 as being 2 times the Creator pitch is fascinating and although it requires some previous knowledge of Harmonics it is certainly a worthwhile supplemental read.