Since coming to the University of Florida, I’ve met a lot of musicians, including a few composition students. While none of their compositions sound remotely similar, they all have one thing in common: when describing their music, they don’t often use words like “pretty” and “exciting,” but they all use the word “interesting.”
The first piece, The Curse of Yig, I found absolutely hilarious (because I was reading the discussion on the chat box). This reminded me of a performance that I had in high school, when a boy in my section (who couldn’t play the music), spent the piece fake-bowing and narrating. It was a spirited piece, and his story was that of a mythical horse flying across Eastern Europe, destroying farmland. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t his most professional moment, but The Curse of Yig made me wonder how the audience would have responded if they were hearing the narration as I was. I think they would have been amused and, given the quality of that particular ensemble, probably preferred it. The discussion in the chat box helped me to make sense of the sound being produced, because occasionally there was narration, like “lighting now,” and that helped keep me more engaged.
Pianolache, if that’s the piece that I think it is, was my favorite. I’m partial to tonal music, and this seemed the most tonal to me (at least at the beginning), and because I had the tonality to lean on and keep me happy, I could appreciate the unorthodox sounds that were incorporated. They were terrifying, but they were certainly interesting.
If the objective of Simoom was to make the listener feel like he/she was in a sandstorm, it was definitely successful. The video especially (but the music too!) left me with enough vertigo that I would not have been surprised if, upon standing up, I stumbled a bit. The dynamics felt natural, in that they were unpredictable and subtle enough to be from nature.
La Langue Maternelle was probably wasted on me a bit, just because I couldn’t bring myself to focus. While I understand the pun in the choice of words, this is something that I would have turned off after about a minute (probably because hearing the deconstruction of the sound of the letter “g” that many times was kind of unsettling, though I can’t describe why.)
Harmonic II tricked me. Rob Seaback came out with his guitar, and I thought “well, I’m sure it will be weird, but at least it will be familiar,” and it was anything but. I spent the entire piece trying to figure out what exactly his pedals were doing. I decided that they were enhancing the overtones produced by the strings, but not the actual resonance (I’m probably completely wrong, but I get the feeling that would do nothing but please the writer of the original algorithm.)
Overall, this concert was entertaining, unsettling, thought-provoking, and a bit intimidating. While it’s not my cup of tea in regards to car music, I can’t deny the creativity that goes into this, and I hope that I one day have an idea that confounds an audience as much as these pieces did.
