damosuzuki said:

heartbeatocean said:

Lemme see what I can dig up.

Interesting....

GangstaFam said:

I should have known Tori was hip to the prepared piano. She is hipper than everyone!!!

heartbeatocean said:

She got even more hardcore with them on "Choirgirl".

GangstaFam said:

Really? what songs? I see it says "mallet piano" in the credits. Maybe that's something like the tack piano. I always wondered what created that Bells For Her sound, that's one of my favorite songs!!!!

heartbeatocean said:

Still sussing the details on that one.

...



Oh....Now I see!! It's funny, I always read liner notes where artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Eddie Jobson were sometimes playing "Treated Piano", and "tack Piano", but didn't know what the hell it meant, lol...Thanks, heartbeatocean!!

btw , I love Copland's stuff, too!!





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[Edited 1/13/07 23:39pm]

While I've done a lot of research into the '20th century experimental classical music genre' (ie. Schoenberg, Varese, Cage, Webern, Berio, Cardew) I've never really liked it that much. For me, it is all too random, often 'ugly', apparently structureless and, in the end lacking feeling or soul.

Some of it is interesting to hear 'in the moment', but imo, while it had a use in loosening up the stuffy mainstream classical world, as jazz and pop music did at the same time, it just doesn't 'move' me really, unless used as film music (as Bernard Herrmann did in his scores for films like 'Psycho').

It seems some here like the dissonance of some of it, but beyond that, what is it you like about this kind of music/ sound?

I ask out of curiosity, not to criticise. Any recommendations of CDs to 'convert' me?

paligap said:

Isn't that altered piano thing the best??? It sounds great too!!!

Miles said:

I'm going to listen to my comp again more carefully and try to ascertain what else I like about it besides the dissonance. If I can manage to be more articulate, maybe it'll be a better sell. I actually find it musically enjoyable, not simply conceptually enjoyable.

One thing I can say though, is I have been feeling a bit burnt out on pop music, rock and roll and all the stuff we talk about here at prince.org I was wondering if it was time for another music fast to clean the palette. Then I put on this compilation and it was exactly what I needed -- challenging, different, open, unexpected, unshaped. I guess I get tired of pop songs that can be so zipped up. I dunno.

I have to add that I regulary go hear this kind of music played live and I have the same response. I just love it. It's an experience. (I hope that's not weird.)

Some info I found about the Helicopter String Quartet


Karlheinz Stockhausen: Helicopter String Quartet

Arditti String Quartet (Irvine Arditti, David Alberman, violins; Garth Knox, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello).

In 1991 Stockhausen dreamt that he saw and heard four helicopters, each bearing a string player: as the helicopters circled overhead, the four separated musicians made music with each other, while on the ground an audience listened to the resulting music through loudspeakers and watched the performers on television screens. The Helicopter Quartet is the realization of this dream.

First given in Amsterdam in 1994, the piece was written for the Arditti String Quartet (who play it splendidly here) - along with, as the score insists, the helicopter pilots, their flying machines, sound and television transmitters and various technicians. In live performance the piece is a cross between a concert, an air display and a seminar. The audience is introduced to the string players by a 'moderator', who also explains what is going to happen; attention moves to the TV screens as the audience watches the musicians walk or drive to the helicopters, embark and take off.

Apart from views of the earth through each of the four glass cockpits, cameras and microphones remain closely focused on each string player throughout the flight: pictures and sounds are relayed back to four separate monitors in the auditorium, one for each musician. During the half-hour performance, the helicopters fly within a six-kilometre radius; afterwards the string players return - now with the pilots - to face the audience for a discussion, in which everyone is invited to take part.

The CD recording is strikingly vivid: the sound textures are rendered with lucidity and a sense of immediacy, and I had no difficulty imagining the absent televisual images - including the helicopters, whose movement (as much as their sound) is central to the work. Fascinatingly, these machines furnish sound sources of a kind that have long been of interest to Stockhausen: their turbines give a full sweep through much of the audible frequency spectrum; their rotor blades provide micro-pulses we can hear either as pitches or beats; singly and together the circling machines dramatically move sound through space; and their constant middle-background hum or pulse - always varying here to reveal subtle timbral shifts - founds another of Stockhausen's extended musical and existential 'moments'.

For the string players, Stockhausen has 're-composed' the interplay of the helicopters' sound- and flight-paths by freely transforming them into vibrant string gestures and textures. This results in ubiquitous tremolo playing, swooping glissandos that transect - or combine - different lines, hectic 'harmonic' activity that starts to cohere into stable sound masses before fragmenting into opposed trajectories, timbral explorations and vocal 'calls' by the musicians to each other in metaphorical and literal transports of delight. The piece ends with a startling, beautiful evocation of winding down - a coda, a landing, but also a passage between different planes or dimensions, and a move toward silence.

No longer perhaps enjoying the same superstar status as two or three decades ago, Stockhausen is none the less still asking questions about sound - about its nature, its possibilities, and what and how it might reveal - that make him pre-eminent among today's philosophizing composers. Disappointingly, the accompanying booklet is silent on such contextual, historical and interpretative matters, though it does supply useful factual material on the piece itself.

heartbeatocean said:

I know what you mean about getting 'burnt out' occasionally. When I'm a bit bored with standard funk, jazz and rock, I sometimes get back into Frank Zappa, who is imo the 'anti-Christ' of so many classic rock groups. And he was deeply influenced by Varese, as well as Pierre Boulez and Webern, among others.

He's great. Get beyond the puerile humour and you've got Varese or even Bartok-style music with awesome, dirty, discordant guitar solos over the top of it.

On another note, beyond certain CDs, Stockhausen stuff is so hard in my experience to get hold of, even in today's age of web commerce. Much of his most interesting sounding work is either rare/ out of print or only available BY MAIL ORDER from his HQ in Germany (eg. his 'Licht' (Light) cycle of operas. Never heard them , but they sound possibly interesting, if expensive).

I'm impressed you go to actual performances of these things, heartbeatocean. I'm not sure if I have the endurance for that.

Miles said:

Maybe I would dig Zappa (I don't have any experience with him really)...

I know what you mean. I forget his name, but there is a modern French composer who did a composition and recording about Frankenstein, and used lots of sound effects mixed in. I really wanted to hear it and I spent months trying to locate it. It was up on the web and Amazon said they had it, but after making me wait for months because it was "out of stock", they finally told me it was unavailable. I've had a few instances of Amazon leading me on like this and wasting my time.

And about the live experimental performances, they're GREAT. Sometimes you see people playing broken clarinets or bowing a drum or sometimes they include surround sound electronic sequences. And usually the musicians performing are top notch, because the pieces can be extremely difficult. The concert series I go to does a great job of mixing up more delectable works with off the wall stuff.

There was one performance I'll never forget of someone pounding chords on the extreme upper and lower registers of the piano again and again. It really tested your endurance and forced the audience to come to terms with the experience in some way or manner.

If I were to recommend a Zappa CD to someone into experimental classical music, it would be 'The Yellow Shark' (1992). This is a group of pieces composed by Zappa for the Ensemble Modern, a German experimental classical orchestra.

They are difficult to describe (like so much of this stuff), but I suppose I'd say it's a mixture of Varese, Charles Ives and Webern and the hint of jazz here and there. It's all played live in concert, and is humourous but quite dark too. No singing and Zappa doesn't play, just music. It's not rock in any way; Zappa in full avant garde mode.

Just my opinion. Most of Zappa's other avant garde stuff is mixed with his rock, jazz, blues, world music and doo-wop-influenced songs.

He also did an orchestral album conducted by Pierre Boulez in 1984 called 'The Perfect Stranger' - again all instrumental and the same avant influences, but maybe a little more Stravinsky than 'The Yellow Shark'. And then there's a compilation of Zappa avant orchestral stuff called 'Strictly Genteel', which is a good intro. to this side of his music. All are easy to come by fairly cheaply online. I'd recommend 'Genteel' as a good starter, but prefer 'Shark' as it's wider ranging and quirkier.

For rockier Zappa, with cool guitar solos, avant garde Varese percussion and puerile humour all in evidence, I'd go for 'One Size Fits All'. Imo, he is one of the best rock/ blues based guitarists ever.

The guy is so multi-faceted and deep, he makes Prince look light-weight in comparison. Well worth checking out if you like 'out there' stuff, often mixed with rock, jazz-rock and even a little funk. But he is an acquired taste. Like avant garde stuff, you either love him or hate him.

heartbeatocean said:

I've heard the piano concertos by John Cage on TV a couple of years ago. IIRC one is even called "Concerto for Prepared Piano" while the other one was just called "Piano Concerto". I think David Tudor, a specialist on 20th century piano music, was the soloist.

Although they're not for prepared piano, I strongly recommend the Piano Etudes and the Piano Concerto by Gyoergy Ligeti (from the 1980s). Absolute masterpieces and highlights of 20th century piano music!!!

Btw, if you want to learn more about Karlheinz Stockhausen, his official homepage is an excellent source:

www.stockhausen.org

I love to see all this hidden orger knowledge coming out into the sunshine!