Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?

     

     As continued from yesterday, we are looking at the strange music from the beginning of the twentieth century.  Charles Ives is an interesting case of someone whose upbringing was the quintessence of boring perfection but whose music stretches the sonic limits.

     Ives' early musical exposure came from his father who was a bandleader in the civil war.  The theory instruction Ives received from his father was anything but standard and experimentation was encouraged.  Ives also gained exposure to hymns while serving as a church organist. He attended Yale and as a top athlete was chided because his passion for music got in the way of his athletic career.  His senior project was his first symphony, a masterful mixture timbres and dynamics.  Ives' creative license quickly spiraled out of control and he eventually began writing songs in which the voice and the accompaniment have little or nothing to do with one another.  Many speculate that his preference for such music came from listening simultaneously to his father's band and other bands perform simultaneously from across town square while growing up.

     Fun Fact: As with Jean Sibelius, one day Ives walked downstairs weeping one day and told his wife: "Nothing sounds right!" and that he could no longer compose.  He spent the last 30 years of his life without creating any new compositions but if you mention his name around those in the field of insurance you may get an avid response.  Ives was as prolific in the insurance industry as he was in music!

Stay Tuned for the Soothing Sounds of Erik Satie...

Music for the End of the World

First of all, if you are interested in the neuroscience of music I suggest the video on the left about music and the elderly.  This week we'll look at some of the more peculiar people and music from the turn of the 20th century.   

First of all a strange Russian man named Scriabin whose harmonies pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the time.  Scriabin believed that humanity was like a pregnant storm cloud which was working towards its ultimate lightning-strike goal and that his music was the catalyst.  Later we will get into Charles Ives, a Yale athlete macho-man who was as revolutionary in the insurance industry as he was in music.  Ives had a tendency to put two totally unrelated melodies on top of each other and the result was often unique to say the least.  Also in store we have a French man named Erik Satie who in the midst of all this wild music found the beauty in the soft and the simple.  Satie was a friend of and a huge influence on the wildly famous Claude Debussy.

Alexander Scriabin, the little frail Russian man with a tenuous relationship with god.  In one of his notebooks he actually claims to BE god.  I might also claim that if Rachmaninoff  decided to play my music for a recording.  Antisocial as a child, enamored with self-fashioned mysticism as a man, he had a system of associating certain colors with certain tones.  He is by no means the first person to draw up such a detailed synesthesia:

Scriabin created the "Mystic Chord," a cluster of six tones which is also often seen in Jazz.  Such tone clusters gave both his piano and orchestral music a unique flavor.

"For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayan Mountains, that would cause a so-called "Armageddon", "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world"... The Mysterium was, psychologically, a world Scriabin created to sustain its own evolution."

 And on that note I leave you to wonder what Charles Ives holds in store...