Percussives
Feb. 4th, 2013 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterOne of my favorite things about attending Tufts was its association with the New England Music Conservatory. That association meant there was an incredible crop of musical resources on campus. I benefited from that expertise for the single semester I could afford the time and money to take piano lessons there, and from the countless free recitals offered on campus. Oh, and had so much fun the semester I took music theory. If only I had taken it sooner, my sight-reading and piano playing would have benefited from it tremendously. I was a poor music student, though, with respect to diligence in practicing, so I wrote my own fate there. Sigh. Some day I will have a piano again and will play it. Probably never as well as I did back then, but still.
I don't think I'll ever forget that one jazz improv recital I attended where the pianist just oozed joy as his fingers rippled across the keys. Nor will I ever forget the piano recital of a work of contemporary classical music where every note the pianist played on the keyboard was echoed by two synthesized notes, one and two octaves above the played note. The pianist wryly remarked to us that while he was learning the piece, it was humbling to have every single mistake amplified and repeated twice immediately thereafter. If I thought the stakes were high to begin with when playing a piano piece, boy.
I still wish I knew the name of that second piece so I could track it down and have a listen again. For a while, I saved the programs from those recitals, and tore a line next to the songs that stuck with me, but sometime between my junior year of college and when I graduated and moved back to Seattle, I recycled those old programs. I am still kicking myself for that. It's extremely difficult to track down contemporary classical music, or even to find recitals/concerts to attend. Most radio stations that play classical music just play the old crap. I mean, it's nice enough, but the contemporary stuff is mind-blowing. Seattle's classical station at least plays a lot from live performances, but even then, live performances wind up being a mixture of what's popular (the old stuff) and what's innovative.
Anyway, today. Today, I was listening to a CD called World of Marimba, by Gilmar Goulet. I hunted down the CD from the Tufts music library after I'd attended a composition class recital, where all of the pieces written in the composition class were played by a woman on a marimba. I'd never heard such an incredible sound. She wielded four mallets simultaneously (like this). After that recital, I realized there was no way to obtain recordings from that particular recital, as it was new work written by a composition class just that semester. But I figured if I liked the sound that much, I should try to track down additional marimba music.
Well, that was in the days before YouTube. That was back before Napster was shut down, where people were in the midst of a cultural musical explosion but were still negotiating with corporations and artists over how to give creative people and their supporters their due. I didn't feel like pirating music was the correct thing to do, plus, I received stern warnings from my father on the subject. So the stuff from the music library was the extent of the marimba music I was able to track down. So hard to search for music by instrument type at that time.
Just today, I finally realized I can just use YouTube to track down more of this stuff. I cannot explain what marimba music does to my brain, but I can tell you that it's caused me to listen to the American Beauty soundtrack more times than can possibly be healthy for anybody (for the record, Thomas Newman also recently pointed out in an interview that his compositions tend to be percussive, which could explain why I tend to like his film soundtracks).
But really. Just listen! It's incredible! Here, for instance, is a top YouTube hit.
And now I should really get back to work. While listening to a few new songs.
I don't think I'll ever forget that one jazz improv recital I attended where the pianist just oozed joy as his fingers rippled across the keys. Nor will I ever forget the piano recital of a work of contemporary classical music where every note the pianist played on the keyboard was echoed by two synthesized notes, one and two octaves above the played note. The pianist wryly remarked to us that while he was learning the piece, it was humbling to have every single mistake amplified and repeated twice immediately thereafter. If I thought the stakes were high to begin with when playing a piano piece, boy.
I still wish I knew the name of that second piece so I could track it down and have a listen again. For a while, I saved the programs from those recitals, and tore a line next to the songs that stuck with me, but sometime between my junior year of college and when I graduated and moved back to Seattle, I recycled those old programs. I am still kicking myself for that. It's extremely difficult to track down contemporary classical music, or even to find recitals/concerts to attend. Most radio stations that play classical music just play the old crap. I mean, it's nice enough, but the contemporary stuff is mind-blowing. Seattle's classical station at least plays a lot from live performances, but even then, live performances wind up being a mixture of what's popular (the old stuff) and what's innovative.
Anyway, today. Today, I was listening to a CD called World of Marimba, by Gilmar Goulet. I hunted down the CD from the Tufts music library after I'd attended a composition class recital, where all of the pieces written in the composition class were played by a woman on a marimba. I'd never heard such an incredible sound. She wielded four mallets simultaneously (like this). After that recital, I realized there was no way to obtain recordings from that particular recital, as it was new work written by a composition class just that semester. But I figured if I liked the sound that much, I should try to track down additional marimba music.
Well, that was in the days before YouTube. That was back before Napster was shut down, where people were in the midst of a cultural musical explosion but were still negotiating with corporations and artists over how to give creative people and their supporters their due. I didn't feel like pirating music was the correct thing to do, plus, I received stern warnings from my father on the subject. So the stuff from the music library was the extent of the marimba music I was able to track down. So hard to search for music by instrument type at that time.
Just today, I finally realized I can just use YouTube to track down more of this stuff. I cannot explain what marimba music does to my brain, but I can tell you that it's caused me to listen to the American Beauty soundtrack more times than can possibly be healthy for anybody (for the record, Thomas Newman also recently pointed out in an interview that his compositions tend to be percussive, which could explain why I tend to like his film soundtracks).
But really. Just listen! It's incredible! Here, for instance, is a top YouTube hit.
And now I should really get back to work. While listening to a few new songs.
