Here, the harpsichord plays rambling, circular figures, busy music that basically goes nowhere. Weinberg continues to play with this phone-ringing motif on and off throughout the movement. Projecting deep feeling into the sounds you discover will bring them to life. By playing and practicing inside the Matrices and Cosmograms a musician will develop dexterity on any instrument in ways that are different from practicing scales and arpeggios.
- Made possible by the largest gift in the College’s 132 year history, a $3 million bequest from the Bob Crewe Foundation, this program is unique in that it is fundamentally embedded into the Art and Design program, not separated from it.
- With the Personal license, every project you create and publish to your channel during your subscription is covered forever!
- Steve is also the curator of The Studio’s vintage keyboard collection, which includes two Hammond organs w/Leslies, Fender Rhodes, a Wurlitzer electric piano, a Hohner Clavinet, and much more.
- She is grateful to be doing music for a living and she knows that the reason people go to parties is to shake their “money-maker” and have fun.
The program, working in tandem with MECA&D’s rigorous visual arts offerings, prepares students to cross traditional boundaries as musicians, performers, sound artists, artists and thinkers. You will note that amidst the percussion instruments are “5 Japanese temple bells,” and it is these plus the glass harmonica that create the eerie droning effect. My readers know that I detest modern-day “ambient” music because it is usually soft, slow, tonal and drippy, but Crumb, one of the pioneers of ambient music, was NEVER tonal and drippy. Even in his slow, soft music, as here, he was harmonically and texturally adventurous to a fault. Like Harry Partch before him, he created sounds never previously heard by human ears out of instruments that were, in other contexts, quite “normal”-sounding, and Dream Sequence is clearly one of these.
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Writing such reflective, slow music for the last movement is surely unusual, but in time the tempo doubles as both lower strings and winds in the orchestra play syncopated figures. He brings a rare combination of seriousness and light-hearted insouciance to this music, which makes it work quite well. Eventually, the busy elements of this movement fade away, there is a moment of silence, and whet it resumes it is again moody and reflective. Being five movements long rather than just three or four, Weinberg has a lot to say in this work. One is struck, for instance, how the solo harpsichord passages somehow manage to sound sad as well, since this is one of the most cheerful-sounding instruments in the world. I must give kudos to Kirill Gerstein for his sensitive, outstanding performance as well.
Style
And Witzel’s solo is an extension of that theme, using its harmonic base to improvise on but also extending the time—and the harmony—within his improvised choruses. In other words, the solo, too, is a composition, just a spontaneously created one. While my readers know very well that I am not a big fan of this modern trend towards soft-grained jazz guitar playing, it is what Witzel plays rather than the style in which he plays it that grabbed my attention. His solos are wonderfully creative, far better than the first “soft jazz” guitarists of the 1990s were.
In other projects
I need not add, for those who have sampled him on YouTube, that this is not how Bychkov normally conducts these works in live performances, but the recording is what it is. A neophyte listener will not be disappointed by it, and may in fact come to appreciate all its little details very well as this is the performance’s primary focus, but as an emotional statement, it comes close but no cigar. Witzel imparts a surprising, medium-fast Latin beat to Lerner and Loewe’s If Ever I Would Leave You although the middle eight, played by Ho, is in a straight 4, and it moves steadily into 4 once the initial theme statement is done and Ho begins soloing. We move back to the Latin beat for Witzel’s solo, here again at a high level, and again extended over more than one chorus. Ms. Information, another Witzel original, is not as fine a composition as the previous two, the melody line being vague and unmemorable, but again the solos are excellent.