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Very satisfying comment about the last release I put up.
beautiful, but that panning!
tears my brain in half. haha - astroid
A couple of years back I decided to try midi sequencing Bach's Three part Inventions - I did the two part inventions as well - and one of the things that really struck me was that the old bioy wrote vertical music.
This is hardly earth shattering news, most music you hear on the radio or on the net is linear - a melody over a supporting chord structure - and you start at the beginning and get to the end and the top line is really important and the other lines just dick around holding it up. The other lines - bass, drums, strings, horns whatever - are just the bridge that the melody goes over to get to the end.
Wheras Bach was writing music where there are ,multiple voices, but each voice is equally important. You have to listen vertically through the score and hear the relationships between the voices as well as the individual voices themselves.
When I was sequencing the three part inventions I remember vlivking my way through the first voice and thinking "Oh well - nothing special" then adding the second voice and thinking "Ooo - listen to that" and when you got the third voice going suddenly everthing just snapped into place and made sense.
I got quite good at listening to the things. When I had practiced a bit i could listen to just one voice or listen to all three and I even got to the point of being able to switch between one and the other - ear exercises. Nothing special - classical musicians do it all the time I guess, but it was a surprise just how well I learnt how to do it with pratice.
Now the stuff on the new album - God of random Things especially, more so than the Reference points - is heavily influence by that experience.
Each of the tracks has three distinct voices and they're placed across the soundstage. There's an extreme left voice a middle voice and an extreme right voice. And when you listen to the things the fact that the extreme left is totally independent of the extreem right and that both of them are unreleated to the middle voice means that you can listen to the individual voices or listen to the relationships between the three and the way they act together. It's expecially noticable through headphones of course.
So yeah, it could tear your brain in half. But in my experience brains learn to listen to the stuff and you get a much more interesting experience out of it.
JS BACH - you can't beat him.
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10/11/06
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astroid
neat
i have this book on counterpoint, where they basically focus on palestrina and what happened before him and how it led up to the polyphony of the 16th century. it says exactly what you're saying-they would make their lines to have as much horizontal independance, while maintaining the vertical rules of which beats could take which kinds of dissonances. i love that stuff.
but classical musicians, they went the exact opposite direction, through the romantic era, when everything was just one big melody line with some crap going on underneath it. even beethoven is like that-maintaining the attention of the listener at all points-the lead melody may switch voices, but there sure is a lead melody.
i always want to do music more like counterpoint, that doesn't insist you listen to it in a certain way. autechre sometimes hints towards that
10/11/06
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Fredo
hahahahahaha, you dis Beethoven and actually the whole Classical and Romantic movement and then praise Autechre! That is kind of funny to me. Sorry. I know this is an electronic forum, but some part of me thinks that within all of the works of Beethoven you can find moments of "vertical counterpoint". And you know I ain't a big Beethoven fan, but you will get bad music karma if you dis whole movements! ;)
10/12/06
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applaud
There's a story that Mozart was shown some manuscripts by Bach and said "At last! here's something I can learn from!" And beethoven learned o play the piano by learning the Well Tempered Clavier. "Bach" in German means "stream". Beethoven once said that Bach was an ocean, not a stream. Thios baroque / classical / romantic stuff is just labels
edited: Oct 12 2006
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astroid
i read his string quartets while taking dumps in the morning. i've sat and tried to unravel that ungodly fugue of his.
EDIT: I believe that makes me the premiere beethoven scholar in LA.
10/13/06
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lunatinker
astroid...and the fact that you became that on a high highˇfaˇluˇtin tootin throne...too too funny.lol.
thanks for that. listening to music vertically. that sums it up nicely enough to remember to
think about counterpoint and varying relationships in a song comp. mindset.
10/13/06
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lunatinker
sorry that was meant to be a funny comment and then a serious one. and
i think it just came out all stupid. my apologies astroid....
10/14/06
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astroid
lol
my original comment was supposed to be silly but came out all serious. sorry, world.
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