Who does not love reminiscing about old gramophone records? I know I do and having once owned several thousand records I can understand the appeal of vinyl. But there is some weird stuff going on with the current so called vinyl revival. Firstly it hardly registers as a revival – more a slight blip…
And then there is the strange case of people buying vinyl records although they do not own any means to actually play them. Conversely many years ago (early to mid 1970’s) I purchased a secondhand Garrard 301 from someone locally and he had an impressively large and expensive HiFi system but only owned three records.
Where as once one could spend a lot of time and money finding the obscure records of choice today we can access most music for very little money and hardly any effort. As wonderful as such streaming services are it can be a little disconcerting to have Apple Music stream a pristine digital version of an old record when you are anticipating the old snap crackle and pop dubbed from vinyl one in your library.
Who does not love brief eccentric piano works? I know I do and have done for most of my life.
When I was very young I would Listen With Mother and on a good day the not very exciting story and inane song would not be of sufficient length to fill the space before the news headlines and so a short piece of music would be played. On a very good day the short piece of music would be by Erik Satie. As he composed numerous short pieces it was often a very good day.
One exceptionally short piece was Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqmNAYUayZs
Biqui was his affectionate name for the one love of his life during their brief relationship.
Another short piece was never published/performed during his life but includes a suggestion that it be played repeatedly 840 times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBhjGIdL5cM
In the 1960s John Cage and a relay team of pianists decided to give it a try. It took over 18 hours to complete (it can take longer). At the completion a member of the much diminished audience shouted “Encore!”.
Satie contributed to the Dada magazine 391 with his eccentric sense of humour fitting well with the Dada spirit. Anyone arriving at a theatre to see the ballet Relâche may wonder if the performance is cancelled. The performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring the Fratellini family clowns, and supervised by Edgard Varèse never opened and as Varèse soon departed for America they did not collaborate again.
Things to do before I die: Learn to play the piano and play Satie’s piano pieces.
Who does not love exploring the musical warp and weft of minimalist music? I know I do and Steve Reich is a particular favourite.
In the good old analogue days I would make a large (room size) loop of magnetic tape and run that through half a dozen assorted old tape recorders arranged around my room – with some intricate Meccano constructions to keep the tape taught and moving. With some recorders set to play the sound and others to record the sounds played a sound recorded as the tape passed through one recorder would be replayed when that portion of tape reached the next tape recorder and re-recorded on other tape recorders. Thus building interesting delays and overlaps of sounds.
Reich’s experiments revealed that two loops containing the same sounds could be started playing together but one, from slight mechanical variation, would slowly fall behind the other thus creating interesting shifts in the combined sound. He used this technique for both constructed tape pieces and composed pieces such as Clapping Music…
As we moved from the analogue world to a digital world one no longer had to mess about with bits of tape. Reich once observed that where he would spend a month splicing bits off tape together to construct a piece you could now do the same thing on your laptop over a couple of evenings – while watching TV.
One of the best tools for such sonic experimentation is Reaktor which has a an extensive library of User created instruments – several of which are inspired by Reich’s work such as..
Reich Tape Looper:
and It’s Gonna Grain (a play on Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain) and Reichatron which I used for Purple Shift – using two identical loops with one slowly drifting out of sync until it completes its orbit and ends up back where it started
https://soundcloud.com/duncan-moran/purple-shift
Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed:
But of course the repeating patterns of minimalism is not everyone’s idea of good music and the maximalist Frank Zappa found it ripe for parody with Spontaneous Minimalist Music Composition…
