John (not so) Caged

Perhaps they'd produced a piece called the "prepared orchestra", where every instrument adds materials to drastically change the original timbre.



This second is better sounding to me. Why? The timbre produced by the individual notes are clearer (perhaps more carefully prepared), hence giving a certain idea which the performer seems to want to drive at. Compared with the first, which was too "random" for my taste, this recording is more telling.

And there!

Leaving the creation of the piece to the audience!

On Ligeti

There we are, a short clip of Berliner Philharmonic on Ligeti's Atmospheres.

It is quite amazing how the clusters don't sound out of tune actually. In some way, the vibration caused by the clusters creates the "atmosphere".

Which brings forth the thoughts about tuning properly according to the pythagorean ratio. Is it relevant here?

Much of the music involves the timbre produced by the cluster of notes played by a group of instruments together(the different families), with plenty of extreme crescendos and decrescendos, i.e. from almost silence to very much "in your face" loud.

I wonder if we take the first instance the music starts, could we find every single chromatic note? That would make it a 12-note pitch set? and complement of it is.... erm... silence?

Atmospheres - John Golland

While listening to some of the prescribed pieces for 20C music, I was reminded of the test piece of WMC 2009, Atmospheres by John Golland.

Starting on a hexachord built on 2 augmented triads, F A C# and G B D# (In fact it was written Cb, Db and Eb on my vibraphone part.) Enharmonic equivalence invoked I guess.

The 2 augmented chords actually form a whole tone scale on F. The equal spacing of the 6 notes in the hexachord produces a lack of a tonal center(absence of leading note), hence giving the 1st movement its essence - Mysterious.

The forte name of the hexachord is 6-35, [0,2,4,6,8,10]. It is self-complementing and interestingly, the IcV is only able to produce either one tone, 2 tone or tritone intervals.

Atmospheres-Gyorgy Ligeti

Soundscapes?

Princess Shostakovich

Uncanny resemblance on the opening melodic line.

To? one of the tracks in Princess Mononoke(Joe Hisaishi)

more work to be done....

Symphony No. 5 Mvt 1 - Shostakovich