Today at the Wind Symphony concert, they played a piece called Apotheosis of This Earth, written by Karel Husa. It's a tale of destruction and demise for the Earth, prophecy-style. It's very dark, chaotic, and seemingly random. It's like Stravinksy on acid.
If that doesn't sound cool enough for you, they use a whole bunch of microtones, most noticeably in the first movement, but they're really all through the piece. I found a link on Youtube for free and I'll put it up here.
Holy crap it's a lot cooler with choir.
It got me thinking about true dissonance again. Not leading tone to tonic dissonance from theory, for the old folks. Real, headache-inducing, makes you cringe tension only caused by playing notes within a few hertz of each other.
It's much more of a modern thing, and I can't really decide if it's a result of equal temperament tuning, how everyone tunes to a440 nowadays so it's easier to write and play intentionally, or if it was considered too disgusting or sacrilegious back in the Classical and Romantic days. I'm leaning towards the former.
Either way, it's pretty freaking cool. I just thought you should know.
If we can get tension out of a fully diminished chord, and feel so relieved after its resolution, imagine how much more tension and how much more release we could experience from cluster chords and microtones! It's like the Saw series versus some creepy thriller that feels like it goes on forever and finally gets happy at the end. Like Signs. I definitely prefer Signs. Or Red Dragon, or The Village.
Not much to talk about today. I'll talk more tomorrow if things go my way.
M
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