Re: Steve Reich & Musicians

[improv@peak.org (Dave Trenkel)]

>murkie writes:
>>
>>i agree wholeheartedly about reich's compositional superiority to glass
>>(yawn).
>
>Another vote for Reich over Glass.  I find Glass horribly repetitive
>(not in a good way).  To me, all his pieces "sound the same", in the
>sense of using the same sort of harmonic movement.  I just can't
>listen to it anymore.
>
Just yesterday I pulled out "Music for 18 Musicians", which I hadn't heard
in at least 6-7 years. I was surprised at how current it sounded, and at
how "electronic" some of the textures were. There was one point that
sounded all the world like a LFO-modulated analog filter.

>
>Maybe one day I'll find an appropriate Reich piece, and make a tape of
>Koyanisquatsi (sp?) with it dubbed in.  ;-)

Reminds me of a 20th Century music class I took. As a final project, one
student compared/contrasted the use of Phillip Glass's music in
Koyaanisquatsi with Ligeti and Penderecki's in 2001. He used the scene from
2001 where the astronaut is traveling into the monolith, with lots of
psychedic animation, accompanied, I believe, by a piece from Ligeti. At the
end of the presentation, he showed segments where he had swapped the music,
using Ligeti's under a Koyaanisquatsi segment, and Glass's under the
segment so badly described above. It was pretty startling. Koyaanisquatsi,
which I had always hated, became much more exciting, with the arythmic
music bringing out the irregular tempos of the filmmaking and editing. The
2001 segment, which is pretty striking usually, looked pretty silly, the
visual effects looking pretty dated. It proved a pretty interesting point
about how the music can affect our perception of visuals

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Dave Trenkel, NEW EMAIL ADDRESS: improv@peak.org
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