Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

 
An interesting piece, using Kate Bush's Hounds of Love to highlight the differences between classical and popular music;

"Structure was carefully delineated, verses and choruses written out fully and marked up in colour, and she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms... In other words, while it had to fit, Kate wanted it to sound "collaged". This superimposition of foreign sources is a technique pioneered by visionary composers like Ives and Stockhausen.

I have always been fascinated by the difference of dynamics at work between popular artists and conventionally trained classical musicians... gifted "pop" musicians like Bush and U2 are far more demanding of themselves in the studio than classical musicians can afford to be, and will spend days working on a tiny fragment. On the other hand, they envy the technique that allows classically trained composers to write something down that can be realised by good sight readers almost instantly. "


As suggested here, classical music was already receptive to the idea of sounds as a concept in its own right rather than as part of overall harmonic structures (John Cage's experiments in creating aleatory compositions springs to mind). I suspect this critical difference is more likely to be due to the role of recording in popular and classical music; the former is noted and can be endlessly recreated and reinvented depending on the player and instruments while, with the latter, the focus is on a single moment. In classical music much of the interest is on how the performance will interpret the music, in popular cover versions are often, though not always, regarded as something to look down upon. Just as photography made the role of realistic art somewhat redundant and created a role for impressionism, expressionism and surrealism, sound recording seems to have shifted the balance in favour of what Brian Eno called creating imaginative worlds.

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posted by Richard 6:56 pm