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Critical Analysis'

John Zorn’s Spillane.

 

There are just so many different themes(?) with different things happening in them, which could change from smooth jazz to something  Burlesque sounding. Then every so often it’s broken up with speech and one of the guys sounds a lot like Vin Diesel in Riddick. The instrumentation varies as much as the moods, I’m just going to call them sections. In each different section, there is a different theme and while the instrumentation is different it’s not hugely different. But there’re two different Jazz-like sections one with sax and one with electric guitar. The only consistency is that there’s no consistency. It’s kind of just a mash up of every known genre of music to man in one 25 minute piece, all though I’m detecting a larger percent of jazz sections, but there’s still just an absolutely massive amount of difference. The dynamic contrast is huge, but only throughout the piece, not throughout the sections, each section kind of sticks to a dynamic but the next one could be completely different. Despite the variation in the sections the overall flow and feel is rather smooth it’s not JUST a mash up, there’s obviously been some sort of thought process involved, and it kind of works.

 

 

Mike Cooper and Chris Abrahams

Oceanic Feeling-like

Oceanic Feeling-like is a three minute piece which sounds like it is for guitar with electronic input. It has a very flowing feel that goes in and out. It doesn’t sound like a traditional guitar piece because of the electronic side of it and the piece benefits from that, otherwise it would sound like another guitar piece, and they generally sound the same. The tempo generally remains the same with a bit of ebb and flow and the same goes for dynamics. The rhythm doesn’t vary from complicated to easy, it stays very much intricate but it varies in intricacy but it still flows and still makes sense for what the piece is trying to accomplish. All in all Oceanic Feeling- like does its job representing an ocean, and does it very well.

Musica Ricercata – György Ligeti

 

Musica Ricercata is a piece for solo piano, with 11 different themes or sections of difference between one another. Much like Spillane, Musica Ricercata works with block form in the extreme. It holds examples of diminution and augmentation in a couple of the sections.  The only thing I’ve noticed that’s the same in each section is the piano, everything is different in each of the sections. There’s a huge range of dynamics ranging from ppp to fff with a sfz chucked into the mix. There are many different time signature changes, not just within the piece, but within the sections as well, going from 4/4 to 9/8 to 2/4 and back again. The music doesn’t just stick to treble in the right hand with bass in the left, more often than not, the left hand is playing somewhere in the treble cleff, but the right hand changes as well, offering really weird and interesting chordal structures. The rhythm jumps from being exceedingly simple one moment then crazily complicated the next. The tempo tends to stay the same, although in saying that there are exceptions mainly in one of the earlier sections the tempo starts off at a regular beat then proceeds to speed up to around 4x the original tempo.

© 0000 by Shaun Deamer. All rights reserved.

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