“Tools” by Ned McGowan was a very hectic and a little frightful piece. The piece is separated into 9 separate sections that are all named after a tool of some sort. The piece has many different…feels… to it. In some parts, it sounds almost melodic. When this melodic sound does come out, it sounds relatively jazzy, which I found very interesting. What confuses me though is why he gave such boring tools a very lively and jazzy feel. For instance, in the song titled “telescope ladder”. There are parts where the trumpet, flute, and lower hand of the piano do some synchronized stuff and it feels very jazzy to me. Then there are other songs in the piece, like the song “hole punch” where it sounds almost mysterious. I liked how in hole punch, throughout the piece there was the sound of a hole punch in the background. I did some research on the very accurate website of wikipedia, and I found out that this collection was the winner of the Henriette Bosmans prize. I did a little more research to find out that it’s only a $3500 prize and that it has only been a thing since 1994.

I thought it was very interesting how the composer brought such a life to each of these tools that I’m assuming most people never even thought of. Now, whenever I see a hole punch, I think of the song named “hole punch” and how wonderfully mysterious a hole punch actually sounds and its personality. Something that I would like to take from this piece is I want to start to personify things through music.

 

I thought the overall piece “Quartet for the end of time” was very similar to other works we have listened to in this course. The clarinet, violin, viola and piano made a very interesting quartet. These instruments are all capable of playing very slow and melodic, while also capable of playing very fast and very short. I think messian did a good job in this piece in utilizing the full potential of these instruments.

The movement that I would like to focus on is the first movement. The tempo is actually very slow, but it is hard to tell by just listening because there are lots of notes being played specifically by the clarinet and strings. From what it sounded like to me, it seemed that the clarinet was the main melodic instrument and the violin and viola were given a counterpoint that was much softer and had fewer notes. When looking at the score, I realized that the clarinet does a lot of short little notes that sound atonal, and while that goes on, the violin and viola are doing glisses or long notes. Then when the clarinet finishes the phrase, the strings play some of the short notes. This creates a sort of hocket feel. As the song progresses, the tempo starts to go a little askew. Whether it be on purpose or not I don’t know, but it kind of makes the piece build without adding more notes or changing the overall feel of the piece. Now that I think about it, it was probably on purpose. It adds a little uncertainty to the piece and gives it contrast which is very odd because the style of the notes and rhythms doesn’t really change. I think this is actually pretty brilliant. Because how do you make a piece even more contrasting when the notes are already super duper contrasting? I guess all you do is play with the tempo a little bit.

Something that I learned from this piece and that I will utilize in my later compositions is the power and influence that tempo has on a piece of music. It can make a piece feel like it’s moving just like adding more notes or a dramatic crescendo can. I think I learned a lot from this piece and I look forward to listening to more of Messians unique pieces in the future.

This kind of music has a very weird history. My friend and I were talking, and she said that this kind of music was what happened in the shadow of the rise of rock and roll. When rock and roll branched out into other genres, this contemporary music grew in the shadows. It’s so different from the melodic and tonal music that people normally listen to, and there is a reason for that.

I think that the name of the piece fits the piece very well. The beginning starts with very separated notes. The beginning is one note and then 11 seconds of silence. It’s a very light and staccato type piece of music. My friends and I decided that the overall sound profile of this music is very “haunting” and “tribal”. It sounds like the kind of thing you would hear in the Larsen dorm room. At the beginning, there is a percussion sound that sounds like waves, and throughout the piece the drumming gets more striking and aggressive. My flute player friend says that the flute playing is very aboritional. She also noticed the large amount of pitch bending that requires lots of technique in the lips and embouchure. I was very surprised to see that the piece was in 4/4, but the piece has lots of fermatas which kind of negates the effect of the time signature. This overuse of fermatas actually caught my attention and I actually liked it. I liked it because every time the “tune” came back, it was very surprising, and every time it was a different sound. I liked the lack of motifs in the piece because it gives a sense of uniqueness because that’s what the composer is trying to be. The common belief of motifs is that it is good for music to return to familiar patterns to not overwhelm the listener. This music does not follow this rule. It goes for a feeling more than a tune. Something that I notice with a lot of these pieces that we listen to is the lack of tonality. With some pieces, even though there was not necessarily a definite tone center, it still sounded melodic (i.e. “Snapdragon” by Young), but this piece focuses more on individual notes carrying more weight rather than whole phrases carrying weight like in normal music. This piece was very unique and the composer did a good job conveying meaning beyond the notes and percussive sounds.

This piece was very interesting to me. I couldn’t figure out how to work that one website with the recording so I looked it up on youtube and actually found a very interesting interview with the composer and the piece being played. Joan Tower is one of the most prominent composers in the second half of the 20th century (which seems a little too specific to be that big of an achievement but that’s neither here nor there). When she wrote this piece, she was very excited to write for the clarinet. She has written many pieces for the clarinet because she loves the instrument so much. She also said that she takes a lot of time to make her titles. As somebody who has this same struggle, I understand whole-heartedly. It’s really hard to put words to pieces that you have written because that’s why it’s a piece of MUSIC and not a POEM. Her reasoning behind calling it what she did is because she was trying to convey an image of different settings of rain. It kind of reminded me of the old disney movies when it would rain and storm or somebody would have an accident and their would be fast string playing. Something that she said was very hard for her was pitting the clarinet, violin, and piano against each other. And I thought her wording there is very interesting. She said AGAINST each other. I usually think of the instrumentals working together instead of working against each other. I don’t understand her reasoning, but I respect it nonetheless and hopefully one day will understand. The reason that she said it was hard to work with the instruments provided was because the timbres of the instruments are very different. Which is something that I experienced writing my duet piece for horn and voice. I think listening to the interview helped me realize that sometimes you don’t have to necessarily make the different voices work together as one. Sometimes the different voices call for some dissonance. One of the requests from the players to the composer was to not add unison between the clarinet and the violin. However, I heard lots of unison between the clarinet and the violin. But there were also parts where they were vastly different. There was no “in between” time where the parts harmonized together “nicely”. Something that she also said was that she actually had to SHORTEN the piece. I wish I had this problem. The pieces that I write are always too short and I end up either just slowing down the tempo or adding a repeat sign (but repeat signs are for the weak). But anyway, back to the piece. I thought that the times that the song really felt like it was developing was when the clarinet and violin had dramatically contrasting parts. It leads to this very aggressive ending that abruptly stops. Throughout the piece, it kind of rises up then settles down over and over again. I thought this was suiting because rain tends to die down and then become very hard very quickly.

Overall I thought the piece was very well done and I really liked hearing the composers thoughts on the piece.

Half String Quartet is a collection of three different pieces: The Beginning, Recitative, and The Ending, and are played in the respective order. Each piece has a different feel to it. The first one feels very melancholic and exaggerated. The contrast between legato and staccato and the fast and dramatic crescendos give the beginning of the first movement a very smooth “breath” type of sound. The thing that I would like to talk about in the second piece is the tempo. The composer put in the description of the tempo the EXACT same thing that I would write. He wrote “Very freely, pushing and pulling tempo a lot”. I think that the composer realizes that sometimes a steady tempo actually devolves a piece. I think Jack Stamp put it best. He compared music to talking in regards to tempo. He stated that people speed up or slow down their talking to convey different emotions. I think that slowing down and speeding up music in specific areas can create emotion that otherwise wouldn’t be there. The third piece is very hectic and energetic. The time signatures are very different in this piece and the music moves by fast so it is very difficult to stay with it. I’ve personally never seen a song in 10/8 and this one had a little bit of it and I thought that part was very interesting.

A very powerful piece of the music is measures 67 through 85 in the third movement. This part gives the whole piece an extra layer of aggressiveness that gives the piece a little bit of contrast even though the whole movement is aggressive and dissonant. However, the rhythms in this part make the dissonance a little bit easier to listen to because all the notes are lined up between the two parts. They are playing a unison rhythm.

The most challenging part of listening and reading along to this piece was the time signatures, and looking at everybody else’s posts I know I’m not the only one. The time signature just changed so much and some were very unique (example would be around 149 in the third movement). It was hard to keep track and I found myself by the end of the piece just listening because I was totally lost.

The parts I found most rewarding were the parts where the piece seemed to settle into a key and have a sense of tonality, which was very scarce. However, I have come to realize that when the sense is tonality is lost for so long, it is very much more powerful when it comes back.

This song matches the other things that we have heard in class so far. The pieces seem very atonal and don’t have many motifs that are recurring throughout the piece. There are a couple parts that sound almost melodic though. For instance, at around 7:45 on the youtube recording the piece talks of her hat being shot and then landing back on her head. For one measure in the piece the composer goes into a polka like feel with coral singing. It is a very unique moment. The notes used are an E to D trill in the melody with a bouncing E flat major chord in second inversion to and E flat with an F in the bass and back to the original chord. These pieces are full of little melodies like this. They are a bunch of melodies that have unique chords to support them and seem to have no correlation to the previous melodies or anything after it.

This song reminded me of John’s piece that he composed. He wrote a story and then put music behind it. However, I think that John’s was more melodic and easier to listen to. The music in Songs from Letters is very hard to listen to, but also has a certain beauty to it at moments. The piano part at about 13:20 I especially enjoyed. To end the piece, the composer does a B flat chord with a sixth that it rests on in the bass and she does that three times. I listened to the youtube video because I was too stupid to figure out the other website.

The chords used to support the melody were as abstract as the melody itself. Libby uses lots of colored chords and dissonant chords. My reasoning for why she does this is because it fits with the melody. A melody that is very sporadic and atonal should have a bass or background that is also sporadic. One part that I think spotlights this idea is at measure 61 of “A Working Woman”. In this part, the melody has quarter notes alternating between G sharp and E natural, and it sounds rather atonal in the piece. And the bass line is even more odd. The first chord at the beginning of that measure I can’t even decipher what it is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Libby just put a bunch of dissonant notes together to really get her point across that this part is supposed to be mean and uncomfortable. The reason I say that that is the emotion she is going for is because the lyrics are “damn their souls to hell”.

So when I write songs, it’s like how a five-year old would. I say to myself “I want it to SOUND GOOD!” then I play something that I think will sound good and match the emotion I want to convey. Usually I can come up with something pretty quick and that I’m satisfied with. My motivation for writing this piece was that my band director asked me while in high school to write these little pieces for tuning chords and stuff. I forgot what they are called but whatever. Normally they are played in church and stuff. Anyway, so when we got this assignment I originally wanted to just do a bunch of stuff and improv but then I realized that was dumb so I didn’t, instead I did the thing that I did when performing. The piece after a while doesn’t match what I had in mind for the piece, but I blame that on time restraints, but not because of the two weeks. My time restraint was that I decided to change my idea like two days before we had to perform it, so I wrote it in one day and practiced it the other. I plan on making revisions for the final piece, if I ever get the motivation to.

What I would do differently in the piece is I would, for a piano…concerto?… is I would not just have piano arpeggios in the bass. I think they are too easy and stupid. But I did it anyway because time constraints. I LOVE using accidentals. The more accidentals in a piece within reason, the better the piece is…sometimes. I would use more accidentals in this piece if I did it again, which I will…someday. Also something that I would do differently is color my chords better. Add 6ths or major 7ths to chords and it’s a whole new feel. I did it a couple times and it might have been enough but I just really like doing that. I might also consider changing keys somewhere. I’ve studied how to change keys in a piece. You can transition to a key with a similar amount of accidentals by using a pivot chord (ie. in the key of D, you can use G to get to C or G or any key that has G. Maybe you could even go to C minor if you colored the chords nicely. I’ve never tried that but I’m going to and this is where I’m writing it down). Or you can make your key change super spontaneous. Also I have to work on transitioning between parts. Playing the intro and then playing a D minor chord into the next part isn’t good enough.

I liked my melody, but I don’t like how I shape my chords around my melody. Makes sense right? Who in their right mind finds chords that matches their melody well or vice versa? I’ve had better compositions just being in math class and writing random notes as a melody and then asking a bunch of people in calculus for letters between A and G, and then I would color the chords based on my melody. I just think it’s more fun and unpredictable. Ooo something else I liked was that I ALWAYS use the borrowed major 5th chord in a minor key (in Dm, an A major) because I think it sounds interesting, but now I’ve done it so many times that i just hate using it a little. I like it in other pieces, but I’m glad I didn’t use it in the piece.

What was easy in this piece was writing it because I did nothing spectacular, it was basic stuff that doesn’t surprise people at all. If I were better at the piano, it would have been nicer to listen to, but I’m not good so R.I.P. that idea.

Something that’s hard for me writing a piece is finding the motivation to actually take time and focus on what I’m doing. I tend to write something, say “good enough”, and move on even though I know I’m capable of writing anything I want.

OH MY GOODNESS I LOVE THE BARI SAX!

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the sound of Snapdragon. It was more melodic than other songs we’ve listened to for this class in the past. It had obvious recurring motifs, like the slow trill between minor seconds and then resolving, or leading to the tonic. However, sometimes it led to the tonic but then never went to the tonic. The middle part is what I had originally expected to hear for this piece. The beginning of the middle part occurs when the bari sax starts playing growl tones at two pitches. While the bari sax is doing this, there are numerous percussion instruments accompanying. Then we reach what I consider the final segment of the piece. It is much like the first part of the song, but percussive instruments are more prominent.

In the song, percussion instruments are used like they would be in conventional music, which surprised me. The song used toms, cymbals, and bells. In the beginning of the song, the tombs act as a sort of counter melody to the baritone saxophone and the chimes/bells are either mimicking the bari sax or playing something to accompany them. Towards the middle of what I consider the “First Part”…

Here’s how I process this piece in my head

First part – very beginning until the saxophone starts doing growl tones (around the 4 minute mark)

Second Part – 4 minutes to about 6:50

Third Part – The ending melodic part

…the cymbals start to accompany. They are not as prominent as the other percussion parts, but still there and very important. They are more audible in the third part of the song where we get this high hat accompany part that gives the song a jazzy-samba feel. I would say it has a jazzy feel throughout the song, but the bari sax is just a jazzy sounding instrument to me. I would say the main part of the percussion in this tune is to give it that samba feel that pleasantly surprises the audience.

In the middle part, the bari sax starts doing double tones with a growly sound. Since the music segued well it still felt like part of the piece and it belonged there. And the transition out of it was also very well done, but it was still a very strange part of the piece. The drums stayed semi-consistent which is good for the melodic aspect of the piece and makes it easier to transition in and out of this mysterious middle part.

Aside from the obvious noises you hear in the middle part, there are also some parts that are there that just add a certain feel to this middle part. The sound that sticks out to me the most is the sound of air blowing or waves. I think this was added in the middle part to give it a soothing sound and not overwhelm the audience. Without it, I think that the middle section would have been very aggressive and  would have served no progressive and contrasting element to the piece.

 

So far for pieces we have analyzed in this class, I would say the theme is definitely “songs with very little melodic structure and that surprise the audience.” This genre of music is much more abundant than a previously thought. There are many composers that write this kind of “music”. While similar, I would say that this genre is moreso just pleasant sounds than music. Maybe these composers are levels ahead of everyone and one day their music will be the new hit thing. Or maybe these pieces are intended by the composer to not be sung and catchy and to just be pleasant sounds.

In the piece, the flutist does makes many different sounds on her instrument. She does things percussive like striking the valves hard to make a soft and subtle thud sound. She also breathes through the instrument and strikes the valves for a different color of percussion sound.

The piece starts and stops a lot. It sounds as if it has no pitch center either, which makes me think that this piece may be chromatic. The flute sound was very sharp (not referring to the pitch, but the timbre of the flute sound was very short and heavy, oh wait that’s just marcatissimo), but also could be very smooth and melodic while still maintaining that rough sound.

I would say that the point of this piece is to spotlight all the unique things that a flute can do. Personally, I was never aware of most of the sounds that the flute could make that she fortes in this piece. I was very surprised.

There are a couple things that I would use in a piece of my own from this piece. Number one being that I never knew that the flute could bend notes like the flutist does in this piece at 2:13 for example. The second thing I would incorporate into a piece of my own is the pitter-patter of flute keys being struck down. I think that kind of sound could be very cool in a band or an orchestra piece of music.

The piece as a whole has lots of short phrases that don’t have a lot of correlation with one another. While the phrases are separate, the percussive sounds keep the song together. If this song did not have the beautiful sound of a flutist striking her flute keys swiftly with their fingers, the piece would feel separated and incomplete, at least more than it already does.

This Aria was one of the most surprising things I’ve ever listened to. With the random melody notes that were sang, and the animal sounds, and the weird crackling sound that gave the piece a weird 50’s movie feel, I was tempted to say that this is not music. And it really goes both ways. Some things about the piece are music, like the woman singing. But then some things aren’t music, like all the miscellaneous, random sounds that one can hear in the background.

I remember something that Professor Joyce said in one of the first classes, that it’s not always about melodies and such, music can sometimes just be about the way it makes you feel. This piece makes me feel very busy. I would actually listen to something like this if I was walking down the streets of New York. The singing almost just sounds like small little fractions of people’s expressive voices talking that I would hear while strolling down Manhattan.

Cage was one of the first pioneers of indeterminacy music. Indeterminacy music, as defined by John Cage himself, is “the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways.” What this makes me think is that his pieces were encouraged to be perceived in many different ways. He wanted everybody to have a different perspective on the piece. Cage also had a weird fascination with neglecting musical instruments, or using very little of them. In a normal sense, this is very strange. Why would somebody refrain from using things that were made to make music? It just seems a bit backwards, but it’s Cage’s idea of music and he was famous so…

On the contrary, I found the background noise (all the stuff that wasn’t singing) to actually be a little percussive. I think many people will interpret it as many different things, but I feel like there was some sort of method to the madness. There is a part of the piece at around 6:15 after some singing where the static noise in the background actually has some rhythm, which I thought was very interesting. Cage finds creative ways to use sounds that are not interesting or unique to us in everyday life, but makes them interesting because he’s a creative guy.

Something I would use in this piece in other pieces is the strange, unsettling sound of background noise. Although I wouldn’t use it in a piece like what Cage did, I would add a nice melody over the top with some chords. Some newer music uses some background noise like the one in this piece that I find pleasant to listen to. One of these songs is Frontier Psychiatrists by The Avalanches. I would recommend this song if you liked this piece, but maybe wanted something a little easier to listen to.