art!

[vostoklake]

Today I sat down with a piece of lined paper and drew dots on it which translate into music, for the first time in ages. It's going to be an instrumental introduction to one of my new songs (Girl without a Past), and it's easily the most interesting/complicated thing I've written since my year studying classical composition.

(I got an A- for that course, but decided against taking it further on the grounds that the only people who listen to "contemporary art music" are other contemporary art musicians. Unless, like, the composer is a drag queen or something. The most fun thing I did in that course was setting the copyright warning from a video tape to music, I kid you not.)

Anyway, the new piece is in the whole-note scale starting on F and is in a time signature that varies between 3 and 5. darthsappho seems to like it, and she's not a music geek, so it must be at least vaguely listenable. It at least seems to fit the song itself, which is reasonably conventional pop music. I hope the rest of you like it, when it's performed, recorded and published.

Comments

[ivymcallister.livejournal.com]

I dated a member of my college's Contemporary Music Ensemble. They only performed twice a year, and it was always a black-tie event, for whatever reason.

What sticks in my mind is watching my tux-sporting boyfriend crawling along the back of the stage viciously shaking the drop curtain to make the chain in the bottom rattle. He then produced a (mismatched) pair of hubcaps that he hung on fishing line before beating them with what I think was a stainless steel spaghetti serving fork. Another part of the performance involved having a pizza delivered to the musicians while they were onstage. They ate while they played, and Dennis (their advisor) threw pizza crusts into the audience.

Musically, I can hardly tell you a thing about it. It seemed more like performance art, to me. Hugh (for that is the ex's name) said that contemporary music was about pushing the envelope and that all their extraneous additions were, indeed, music.

[laputain.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call that either music, or "performance art", but "jerking off", quite frankly. :) I mean, it sounds like it was probably fun, but the fact that it was a "black-tie event" suggests that it wasn't *supposed* to be fun, and in that case I can't see the point.

I'm all in favour of pushing the envelope - which is why I scored a whole-tone passage in an irregular meter as an introduction to an electro-pop song - but this seems like one of the primary examples of why I think "contemporary music" is nothing but preaching to a small clique of pretentious gits who're already in on the joke. Of course, all academic disciplines are like that, to some degree, which is why I don't think academic music is worth a damn.

(I have a Phish tape somewhere. I should listen to it again.)