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Over the last year I've been dabbling with orchestral/classical/ugh-I-hate-naming-genres music. For the most part it still doesn't do a whole lot for me, but there have been some successes. I've become quite fond of The Rite of Spring, for instance. And I've ended up absolutely enamored with the minimalist composer Steve Reich. The irony of setting out to explore symphonic music and ending up focusing on the most minimal and restricted version of this is not lost on me, but some things are beyond my control.
Clapping Music was my introduction. The elegance and precision of it blew me away. Like most of his work, it feels like a finely crafted watch without any ornament or complication. Everything absolutely has to be the way it is, a piece of art utterly lacking in the contingent. I'm working on a design for a mechanical device to perform it, with hand-cranked cams that advance every 8th rotation.
I don't even understand how these performances are humanly possible.
Music for 18 Musicians is downright magical in its effects on me. I genuinely enjoy listening to it on its own, but it can also serve as a particularly valuable form of whitenoise -- I can crank it on headphones to drown out boring lunchroom conversation or pre-movie ads, and still be able to read dense texts! I'm very easily distracted by sensory input, so this is a glorious feature. I wouldn't have even thought it was theoretically possible for anything more aesthetically advanced that pure white noise.
Clapping Music was my introduction. The elegance and precision of it blew me away. Like most of his work, it feels like a finely crafted watch without any ornament or complication. Everything absolutely has to be the way it is, a piece of art utterly lacking in the contingent. I'm working on a design for a mechanical device to perform it, with hand-cranked cams that advance every 8th rotation.
I don't even understand how these performances are humanly possible.
Music for 18 Musicians is downright magical in its effects on me. I genuinely enjoy listening to it on its own, but it can also serve as a particularly valuable form of whitenoise -- I can crank it on headphones to drown out boring lunchroom conversation or pre-movie ads, and still be able to read dense texts! I'm very easily distracted by sensory input, so this is a glorious feature. I wouldn't have even thought it was theoretically possible for anything more aesthetically advanced that pure white noise.