Kronos Quartet

I can't believe I've only found this now!:


Sun Rings (2002)
for string quartet, chorus and pre-recorded spacescapes

1. Sun Rings Overture
2. Hero Danger
3. Beebopterismo
4. Planet Elf Sindoori
5. Earth Whistlers
6. Earth/Jupiter Kiss
7. The Electron Cyclotron Frequency Parlour
8. Prayer Central
9. Venus Upstream
10. One Earth


Just need to get my hands on a recording....

Makrokosmos

This week I attempted to learn Spiral Galaxy from George Crumb's 'Makrokosmos'. I have come to the concrete conclusion that this spiral shaped score is just completely illogical. It just won't do! I don't have a head that spins 360 degrees vertically on my neck.




All that aside, this is a very cool piece, which explores the full range of the piano beginning with the depth of the lower piano and introducing some unusual sounds that are cuased by the objects placed on the strings. It quickly jumps to the higher strings where a haunting and displaced melody (akin to Morton Feldman, I can't help feeling) on the upper middle register is introduced before it descends into a series of falling dissonant chords. It ends with a poignant melody on the upper register, fading out to an eerie end. The depth and harmonies featured in Spiral Galaxy demonstrate a richness of sonorities and the profound notes of the lower register hint at the emptiness and vastness of space that even a huge galaxy can find itself in.

Electro(lux)

Today I was doing some shopping and as I reached into a fridge to grab some milk (it was an aisle of large open refrigerators) I heard a pleasant humming sound emanating from the fridge. The one next to it was also humming and the two created a pleasantly wavering interval. I stood there for a while leaning into the fridges and figured out the interval as a minor 6th but it was by no means a pure interval; other electronic humming behind the two louder hums deraged it. I began then to think about frequences, and the physics of music.

I might use these inadvertent sounds in some of my own pieces, such as creaking sounds of a telescope or perhaps i'll record some friends next time we're all lying under the night sky picking out constellations. I'm still in the experimenting stage with electronic music, because at Queens you were either a BMus student or a sonic arts student. There were few who crossed the divide. But I wasn't going to cover my ears and pretend it was another faction, especially not now.

Remember that sound?!

I've been checking out some electronic music recently (a piece by a composer named Pete Stollery), and was listening to this one piece that dealt with capturing the sounds of this old whiskey distillery that was son to close, and so it was important to record these familiar sounds before they became extinct.

This got me thinking about sounds that used to be familiar to me that are no longer around. I thought about the dial telephone my family used to have, or the familiar sound of a tape deck buttong being pushed on my old hi-fi, the tapping of my mother's typewriter, and the sound of waiting for your dial-up internet to connect. All these once familiar technical sounds are also extinct - even though some of them had only been created years earlier. Technology is moving so fast that these once everday sounds are barely given the chance to be redolent through more than one generation (I've lived in four decades, two centuries and two millenia, and the growth in technology that I've witnessed in my lifetime has been exponential).

Just think of all that oversized equipment and slow powered computers used to man the first moon mission.

I bet that someday, we'll come up with smaller pieces of technology to replace those massive radio telescopes and even the hubble telescope. The problem is that radio telescopes just seem to be getting bigger, so that radio astronomers can reach out even further into space.

There is one noise that hasn't really changed - I guess it wasn't really invented, but rather discovered. Still, the technological means of attaining it are still about. Static noise.

Yes, with the implementation of digital tv, that is one way of making this extinct. But we still hear it through radios. 1% of that noise is radiation from the centre of the milky way. So lets hope that digitalisation doesn't block us out of regularly tuning in to the galaxy (whether we know it or not).

Star Music

Apparently this is what Stockhausen came up with to describe Anton Weberns Piano Variations. I had a listen to opus.21 mvt II, and I get it. There's no clear cut pattern to it and you never know what not you're going to hear next.. A bit like what you see when you look up at the stars.