Comments on: what you see is what you !!THUMP!! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2013/06/what-you-see-is-what-you-thump Lollards in the high church of low culture Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:25:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 By: xyzzzz__ https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2013/06/what-you-see-is-what-you-thump/comment-page-1#comment-1151277 Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:25:45 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=24966#comment-1151277 Wonder if there is any relationship between that and psychedelic type visuals. This is one I found for Holliger’s brill piece (I’ve made an “Oboe from Mars” comp, gathering many great compositions for the instrument as a result. Not available in any shops sadly)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET5SHm9Ri-c

And then in film that scene in Kubrick’s ‘2001’ bore-fest.

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By: swanstep https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2013/06/what-you-see-is-what-you-thump/comment-page-1#comment-1150024 Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:53:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=24966#comment-1150024 The visualization is interesting, but it’s not optimal, rather what you want is shots of storm-troopers galloping around the Death Star for the steady chugging bits, shots of the shark chase in Jaws for the chugging bits that crescendo, cutaway two-shots of our heroes for the plaintive woodwind passages that alternate with the chugging, and so on.

My experience is that The Rite felt much more forbidding and alien when I was a teen than it does these days, and I don’t think that that’s ‘just me’, as it were. Rather the kind of ‘pop-Stravinsky visualized’ that the Jaws and Star Wars scores represent and that has been completely absorbed by now effectively reduces the ‘problem’ that The Rite tended to pose for audiences to its most jazzy or most chaotic bits. (Earlier use of The Rite in Fantasia helps too but, for my money it doesn’t have the kind of editing to parallel action that Jaws/Star Wars do that makes complete visual sense of Stravinsky’s sudden jumps and alternations.)

Something similar is true for Pendereski’s Polymorphia – it’s *so* much easier to listen to it with the kind of The Shining/The Exorcist visualization that many of us carry around in our heads. I’d always recommend that orchestras provide visual aids of these sorts for these kinds of pieces. The Rite of course originally accompanied dance – as a lot of Stravinky’s most influential stuff did – and that too is a great way to hear it.

Naked orchestral performance of a lot of the big 20C classical monuments – i.e., the sort of thing I ernestly forced myself through in college – is a big mistake I feel, and in peak cases like The Rite most of us now come to it so equipped with visualization that most of us *can’t* hear it ‘naked’ any more.

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By: thefatgit https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2013/06/what-you-see-is-what-you-thump/comment-page-1#comment-1149981 Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:34:22 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=24966#comment-1149981 I maybe heard “The Rites Of Spring” around my early teens. Compared to less complex pieces I had grown up with (Holst’s Planets Suite, Mahler’s 5th, Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo & Juliet), this was incredibly complex, but nonetheless compelling. The visual cues of the clips work incredibly well for those of us who can’t read music. Translate it into a series of coloured blocks and things start to happen. I found myself looking for the thematic patterns within the piece. I started to recognise what was about to happen before it happened. And I know I hadn’t heard this piece in over 20 years. It’s quite a weird but wonderful experience, I can tell you.

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