In B-Flat (2009)(inbflat.net) |
In B-Flat (2009)(inbflat.net) |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOSfM2V8EkI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB7NxVpskI0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmKWkiDAm5k
Great atmosphere. Makes me think of a good video game soundtrack. Interestingly they don't sound good if you only play 2 of them, you need all 3 to pull the harmony together.
For people who don't get the reference, one of the defining pieces of the Minimalist movement in 20th century music[1] was "In C" by Terry Riley[2]. Minimalist pieces often (but don't always) include elements of non-determinsm like in this.
[1] Minimalism here doesn't mean "not many notes" it means deliberately restricting the range of harmonic and rhythmic materials available to the composer. Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and Arvo Part represent well-known composers with very different takes on the style if you want to check out more.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_C to read about "In C" or try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbTn79x-mrI&pp=ygUQaW4gYyB0Z... as an example performance.
So they missed the opportunity to call this "In B#".
Also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po%C3%A8me_symphonique
This is not necessarily what minimalism means. Minimalism is just an abstraction for certain kinds of art, possibly with various incompatible techniques. For some artists (not just musicians, but also painters, poets etc) minimalism means "repetition"-ism i.e. art with excessive amount of repetition to the point that you'd normally expect it to be "boring" but it somehow uses it to its favor with rhythmic, harmonic, or formal techniques. Philip Glass is the pioneer of this idea in music, and I personally consider him one of the most creative and groundbreaking artists ever lived. His music is very tonal, "simple" and repetitive in his oeuvre (i.e. repetition not just in one work, but repetition among his body of works like minimalist painters Mondrian and Rothko) which makes him a very very controversial musician, some critics considering him a charlatan. To me, he's a Schoenbergian figure who is making a bombastic and over-the-top artistic statement by going against the current of his artistic tradition while remaining firmly in it. Similarly, Schoenberg was also considered a charlatan during his life, especially early on.
For those interested, I recommend this composition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKJoQ8BfQhw (full on spotify, sorry)
Oh also if you ever think "classical music doesn't have a cultural force anymore" please pay attention to contemporary film music that's not neo-romanticist. You'll see that there is tons of minimalist influence from Glass, Reich, Andriessen, Richter etc...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique
Or to the whole of impressionism in music?
"In 1912, the French composer Ernest Fanelli (1860–1917) received significant attention and coverage in the Parisian press following a performance of a symphonic poem he wrote in 1886, titled Thèbes, incorporating elements associated with Impressionism, such as extended chords and whole-tone scales.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism_in_music
Writing in 1958, the critic Rudolph Reti summarised six features of Debussy's music, which he asserted "established a new concept of tonality in European music": the frequent use of lengthy pedal points – "not merely bass pedals in the actual sense of the term, but sustained 'pedals' in any voice"; glittering passages and webs of figurations which distract from occasional absence of tonality; frequent use of parallel chords which are "in essence not harmonies at all, but rather 'chordal melodies', enriched unisons", described by some writers as non-functional harmonies; bitonality, or at least bitonal chords; use of the whole-tone and pentatonic scales; and unprepared modulations, "without any harmonic bridge". Reti concludes that Debussy's achievement was the synthesis of monophonic based "melodic tonality" with harmonies, albeit different from those of "harmonic tonality".
And music from horror movies and battle scenes if you want to hear the contemporary influence of serialism and new complexity.
In B-Flat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941838 - Dec 2017 (43 comments)
I still like it, whatever it says about me.
To me, it's a bit similar to Skrillex or Rite of Spring, both of which I like almost completely because of their texture. If you like it, if you don't, that's fine -- no need to be prescriptivist about it. At the end of the day it's all just vibrations.
It reminds me (presumably intentionally) of Terry Riley's "In C" in which any number of musicians on any instruments perform together on stage. All following the same tempo, they each have a set of music giving several dozen short sequences of notes. They each, individually, decide when to come in, how many times to repeat each sequence, and when to move on to the next sequence. As the piece continues, the soundscape is constantly evolving in an unpredictable way, but always in tune with each other and pleasant in its harmony. Each time it's performed, even by all the same musicians, then, it sounds different, yet the same. It's a really fascinating piece and if you get the chance to see it performed live, I highly recommend it, because it's a lot of fun to watch the musicians themselves experience the performance and feed off each other.
Check out this YouTube search for a variety of live performances: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=in+c+live
It's a grid of youtube embeds linking videos of people playing simple, improvised sequences in Bb on different instruments. They can be played in different orders, combinations and overlaps to create different textures.
- They're not playing in the same tempo
- They're not playing the same note lengths
- They're not necessarily playing notes in the same chords
It's somewhat analogous to sitting down at a piano, holding down the sustain pedal (so that all the notes played ring out for a long time), and just playing notes in the same key. (Say, all the white keys.)
It "works" because the notes are in the same key. But note that we're not making music with any kind of groove or consistent beat. It's more like an ethereal, improvised holding out of a single chord.
TL;DR – "Or is the whole point that they didn't agree to anything upfront and it still somehow works?" Yes :)
But I am running this on a laptop.
I assume B# was intentional in that comment.