In Distance

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.