So, Jonathon Rose, here is the “composing” post I’ve mentioned a couple times that I needed to find the time to write. A couple of nights ago, I had the radio on to our local classical station (about the only music we “regularly” listen to these days, though I do listen to “other stuff” for variation and to “keep up” – eg, just earlier today when I got off work, I listened to the new Prince album…no comment for now). The host played a piano piece by Ravel that I had never heard before. Not many of those around since Ravel is up there pretty darn high on my list of favorite composers. So it was fun hearing something “new” from him. It was called “Valley of the Bells” from Miriors. Miriors consists of five movements, one of which is his famous “Une barque sur locéan” (“A boat on the ocean”) which I have obviously heard and enjoy, but I’m not sure I’ve heard the other parts (since the titles are in French, which I don’t speak, I don’t associate the pieces themselves with the titles as much as I do pieces with English titles and sometimes there are pieces I’m familiar with that I don’t know the title of off the top of my head), so there are at least three more potentially “new” things to listen to by Ravel – yay!) In any case, I’m providing a link here if you are interested in hearing it (you can “click through it” to hear bits of it if you like, since that is essentially one of the points of this post). The reason I am using this “first time hearing” piece is that it very clearly (for me, anyway – your mileage may vary [YMMV]) demonstrates a “quality” that I hear in it, even the first time through or even just in portions of (when I heard it on the radio, the first thirty seconds were enough to demonstrate this quality to me). And this is where I readily admit to blatant subjective argument and hard-to-describe experience so I understand if you want to simply disagree on “so there!” grounds without substantiating argument – I’m doing pretty much the same thing at this point. Anyway, the quality I’m talking about is simply a clear recognition, even during a first hearing, that this is not only a “composed piece”, but is a knowledgeable, nuanced, deftly, and well-composed piece. Understand that this has nothing to do with whether I actually personally “like” the piece or not. At this point, I’m not at all sure it if will end up on my list of thousand favorite pieces of music pieces or not. I may even actively dislike it (unlikely, but certainly possible). The point is, that despite any personal views of liking or disliking it, I recognize that quality described above. This is something I’ve tried to write about before but never actually posted because I wanted concrete examples that I couldn’t think of at the moment. And when I heard this piece, I realized that it was a good example because on the surface (ie on first hearing), it could almost be a kind of syrupy New Age/George Winston-ish or even vaguely prog-rock influenced piece. And yet the point is that it SO CLEARLY is NOT that. It has a subtlety and, well, “composed” – nay, “well-composed” aspect that is hard to put my finger on, but which I can clearly hear in the very performance of it. And I guess this gets to the heart of some of the “passages” I’ve highlighted and commented on in some of the things you’ve tagged me on (the most recent was that violin thingy minute-long excerpt near the end of what-was-it? “Dense” I think – I remember because I punned on that title). Those examples, to me, however “intense” or appealing or non-appealing they might be, simply did not strike me as having that “weightiness” of a “well-composed” piece. I should stress that there are lots of pieces of music that I would say are not “well-composed” that I nevertheless still love dearly. And I should also stress that since my sense of this “well-composed” quality is so very subjective (at least in my present ability to try to talk about it – perhaps a college music major could articulate it better, not sure), I’m VERY sure that it is not an infallible guide for me to decide on a piece’s intrinsic “well-composed” quality – or even about my own eventual personal preferences. Most pieces of music that are on, say, my top 100 list (if such a list were even possible for me to construct), required multiple listens in order to assess how well they stand up. As an aside, I’ve found that generally – though there are many exceptions in both directions – pieces that were immediately appealing to me, tend to “wear thin” easily, while pieces that may have been initially un-striking or “difficult” or even unappealing [note that this “appealing” or “unappealing” aspect is quite different than the “well-composed” aspect] can, upon repeated listens, become some of my favorite and long-standing and wears-well-with-repeated-listenings pieces. And this near-requirement for multiple listens is what makes many of your taggings of me on various pieces so difficult to even consider (though I’ve tried on several occasions, as you know, to give an offhand assessment, inadequate as they may have been – I simply don’t have the time for all the things on my present personal “list” let alone all the other things I would “like” to bandy about with friends). Anyway, my point on all this long (so far – there’s more coming) post, is to wonder whether you can “hear” this “well-composed” aspect I’m talking about here on this piece? Again, I’m not asking whether you “like” the piece or not (though of course feel free to also say whether you like it, along with any other aspect, if you so desire), but I’m most interested in whether this quality I’m talking about – being “well-composed” – is something you can also hear or if you might think I’m fooling myself into thinking I sense. And note that you might well agree that there is a “well-composed” quality that pieces of music can have that you nevertheless disagree with me about on this particular piece – again, I don’t claim that innate sense I have about this piece (or any other piece of music) to be infallible, just that it is a good general indicator for me that typically leads me in the right direction even if it occasionally fails me. I’ll just mention a couple of other “difficult” pieces that I now love (or at least enjoy enough to remember) but that didn’t initially especially appeal to me, and yet “felt” well-composed, even at those initial stages. One is the ELP piece from Brain Salad Surgery that I mentioned the other day, “Toccata”, another is the Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) by Khachaturian that was used in the movie 2001 (and was mimicked in the soundtrack to Aliens by James Horner), and also the (perhaps overplayed) piece I’ve mentioned at least twice before, the first Gymnopédie by Satie. (By the way, I couldn’t resist mentioning the Gayane piece because it is (for the most part) virtually entirely done with only two “voices” in a rich, harmonically complex, exquisite – and well-composed – fashion that Angelee and I have wanted to try to accomplish in a composition of our own – a very minimalist thing to do and therefore quite difficult to do effectively – AND, by the way, something quite different than the sort of “minimalist” things composers like Glass and Reich are trying to do. Ok, so finally, I want to suggest that this “first hearing” thing is difficult to talk about in general. I’ve done it here because I am intentionally talking about a quality that, to me, displays itself even during a first listen, and so it IS something I can give examples of. But other types of music discussion (and there are lots of other topics of course), to me, pretty much require that both parties (or however many parties and views there may be) be pretty familiar with the particular piece in question so that they can mutually and effectively “talk about” the aspect under discussion. So for instance, I was surprised there was anybody in existence who hadn’t actually heard and was intimately familiar with The Beatles’ “White Album” (ok, I’m exaggerating, but only for fun at this point), so that clearly is not a good selection on my part for discussion (with you, anyway) of musical themes and such. But just for future reference (I don’t really want to discuss that sort of thing now), are you pretty familiar with what I consider to be one of the all-time best produced and musically intelligent albums (though also perhaps one of the most corrupt and debasing at points), “Aja” by Steely Dan? There are several topics of discussion about aspects music appreciation that could be had about that album alone (and no, you don’t have to “like” it, only be familiar with it). Or if not, there are lots of other potential choices of course, but I think there really needs to be a concrete example of common ground experience to get any deeper discussions (again regardless of whether two parties agree or disagree) than a simple “well, I like it, so there!” or “Are you kidding? This piece stinks – there’s nothing else to be said about it”. Ok, that’s my hour-and-eighty-seven minute long post if you’ve managed to read it this far. I’m linking to a complete recording of Ravel’s Miroirs, of which “Valley of the Bells” is the fifth movement at 17:21 and is about 5 minutes long (while I was typing this, I listened to the entire thing and as I mentioned, I already knew the third movement, “Boat on the Ocean”, and I realized that I am also quite familiar with the fourth movement and simply didn’t remember the name, but the first and second were “new” to me too, along with the fifth, so three “new” Ravel pieces is a real treat for me :-) ) youtube/watch?v=YWXpQYGzQPs
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 01:23:44 +0000
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