This Week in the Mercury
Friday, August 22, 2008
Video And Now For Something Completely Different
Posted by Andrew R Tonry on Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:53 PM
Here's an End Hits First: a post about classical music.
Not your average classical--the freakier, nerdier, outsider classical. Follow the link for a video from the good ol' Lehrer Newshour on the Bang A Can festival. Basically it's a series of workshops and performances for classically trained musicians to stretch out and follow their Cage-ian instincts.
Some of the shit totally sucks, and the folks at Bang A Can will be the first to tell you: the outlandish threads followed don't always bear fruit. But some do.
David Lang, one of the curators and a winner of the Nobel Prize for music (who knew the award even existed?), produced a pretty interesting vocal piece "The Little Match Girl Passion." My favorite of the compositions featured in the video is towards the end from the 29-year-old steel drummer Andy Akiho. Akiho, who has never composed before, basically writes a big ensemble piece where everyone plays with the percussive meter and melodic style of a steel drummer. It's pretty fucking sweet.
Through their question, I developed one of my own. Basically, Lang and company are trying to challenge the boundaries and explore what music is. They do some strange things like banging on metal and yelping, but it's always performed live. There are no synthesizers. I'd be interested to know what Lang and the folks at Bang A Can think about electronic experimentation. I'll bet you one thing: They don't like Girl Talk.
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