Humans Are Insane!

First of all, this is totally insane!!!



This is a piece by contemporary composer Steve Reich, written for two pianists.  It's called a phase shift meaning it's the exact same thing played over and over again at two very slightly different tempos.  The fact that one human is able to do it is insane.  This video is a little abridged, but you can see the effect of the phase shift.

Now on to Satie...



That is the soothing, soothing sound of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 from his Trois Gymnopedies.  Satie was another composer from the turn of the twentieth century.  He was french and although he composed around the same time as Ives and Scriabin, he was known for the simplicity of his melodies and his adherence to common tonalities.  He was friends with (and a great influence on) his much more well known contemporary Claude Debussy.  Debussy arranged a number of Satie's piano works for orchestra - here is a stunning orchestration by Debussy of Gymnopedie No 1:



Satie preferred the title of 'phonometrician' (someone who measures sounds) to that of musician.  If you enjoyed the Gymnopedie, I strongly encourage you to check out the music of contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Part, particularly his Spiegel Im Spiegel.

Stay Tuned Next Week for Some Schooling in the Classics and a Look at the Modern Traditions...

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...