Quiz: Mystery scores

[greg]

Alternatively, Greg, dear boy, my carefully put-together lists (as a few posts up) are hyperlinked to all 500 or so scores.  0:) So just click on the one that says 'Murail', under the heading 'Set by Symphonien' to be whizzed to the score of your choice.  0:)

hehe

[lukeottevanger]

Sorry to have overlooked your tool, Luke.



(And don't take that wrongly, this is no 'Carry On'-post...)

It's all right, you're not the first one

(and ditto)

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

It's all right, you're not the first one

(and ditto)

[lukeottevanger]

Clue on my 206 - it makes me think of aeroplanes and runways...

More precisely, this one....

[lukeottevanger]

(Try overlooking that tool, Johan.  )

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

(Try overlooking that tool, Johan.  )

(I can't, I can't!)

[lukeottevanger]

Really? That doesn't jog any memories? Then I've no choice but to reveal the answer:

http://www.youtube.com/v/quv2U1_hHRQ

That's Glass, the 'Vessels' section from the score to Koyaanisqatsi. IMO (rather uncontentious, this) Glass at his very best, this whole score.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Really? That doesn't jog any memories? Then I've no choice but to reveal the answer:

I can't remember what I haven't seen/heard... 

[lukeottevanger]

  Then you are excused! What do you make of the clip?

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The music is alright, but a bit too inoffensive... That's the difficulty I have with this kind of minimalism - it's too decorative. And singing the praises of the Car - if that's what happening in that clip - isn't exactly to my liking, either. In conclusion: I like it but it isn't nutritious enough.

[lukeottevanger]

The music is alright, but a bit too inoffensive... That's the difficulty I have with this kind of minimalism - it's too decorative. And singing the praises of the Car - if that's what happening in that clip - isn't exactly to my liking, either. In conclusion: I like it but it isn't nutritious enough.

I would say the opposite is what is going on - the film is wordless, plotless, so one makes of it what one will, but the general consensus is that it is an 'environmental' film which stunningly juxtaposes images of natural beauty with manic, mindless, machinelike human activity. To emphasize this, the Hopi title translates as 'crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living'. Use of simple but disturbingly effective sped-up-film techniques makes us see the natural world of rocks and clouds afresh, as an organic, living thing; and also, most memorably dehumanises the individual. Shots of commuters descending subway escalators at insanely fast speeds are jammed up against shot of sausages shooting out of a machine at equally fast speeds. Sounds corny, I suppose - but it was the first film to do this, and does so with a power and conviction that I've never seen anywhere else. Ocassionally, and so poignantly, the director Reggio breaks the incessant flow with a slowed-down sequence concentrating on a single human face, or someone simply walking. So simple, this contrast in scales, but so effective.

As for the music - well, I just repeat that, though Glass is not always my cup of tea, this score is simply a masterpiece. Remember, Glass's music is all we hear for the entire duration of the film, and it evolves in a fairly small number of big slabs of which this 'Vessels' section is one. The simultaneous hyperactivity and relative stasis of Glass's score - arpeggios speed past whilst very little is happening, harmonically - is the perfect musical image to accompany both Reggio's rolling cloudscapes and his awesome cityscapes (which in the film's most striking portion, a long section entitled 'The Grid' take us from the still dead of night in a blinding accelerando of inner figuration to a kind of warp speed in which the city 'turns into' a computer chip). The section excerpted, Vessels, seems to me to be very powerful, the combination of these wordless and so-human voices (this is the first time they appear in this unaccompanied way in the film) with the machine appearing from the heat-haze touches something very deep.

Some more excerpts (indulge me!):

http://www.youtube.com/v/7a2K4pcAFIM
from the first, 'natural' half of the film.

http://www.youtube.com/v/vINtNxnGMBg
the camera starts to move, towards the city. The pulse increases... dazzling photography here

http://www.youtube.com/v/t29fgA5M7VA
'Pruit Igoe' - maybe the most famous music in the film, and the most classically dramatic

http://www.youtube.com/v/rPY6jTiCMh8
The opening 9 minutes of 'The Grid', the film's centrepiece.

http://www.youtube.com/v/oWsTIW3dKuU
The end - the film builds up to this 'triumph of the machine'; the music of the opening returns - slow, simple, mournful arpeggios slowly turn whilst the machine hurtles wildly upwards....then...


And, btw, sorry if this seems little-related to the subject at hand, but to my mind the best thing about this thread is that it is an opportunity to explore, in a random way, pieces and composers and in this case a film, that we don't know. Which is why I've also posted the odd audio clip as well.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Thanks for the extensive exposition/introduction/rebuttal, Luke... I'll watch the clips at my leisure later today.

[Sean]

Koyaanisqqatsi, hey!!

Where does the sense of nostalgia come from though? This interests me; indeed being drenched in a sense of the past particularly the 1970s/ early 80s seems to be a characteristic of minimalism sometimes (Nixon in China is another fine example). My theory is that the music senses that the period was a watershed, following which was to be the present artistic and social decline.

[karlhenning]

. . . the music senses that the period was a watershed . . . .

One of the more transparent pathetic fallacies one reads these days.

[Sean]

Indeed I wish it could be read more often.

[karlhenning]

I think you are avoiding the res, which is that no music "senses" anything, let alone your eccentric ideas of what music in our own lifetime constitutes a "watershed."

[greg]

Really? That doesn't jog any memories? Then I've no choice but to reveal the answer:

http://www.youtube.com/v/quv2U1_hHRQ

That's Glass, the 'Vessels' section from the score to Koyaanisqatsi. IMO (rather uncontentious, this) Glass at his very best, this whole score.

i like it!

[lukeottevanger]

Symphonien's no 6 - Sciarrino, either Sei Quartetti Brevi or String Quartet no 7. (Perhaps....)

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I have watched all the clips and listened to the music. Glass really must have enjoyed himself. He has been endlessly inventive in finding sounds and rhythms to match the film's imagery. In this sense I can understand your phrase 'his masterpiece'. Because patterning and repetition are everything, the smallest change becomes a sensation, and the bigger one even a shock.

You have convinced me of the quality of this music. Whether the music would be my cup of tea just on its own, I don't know. But in combination with images, as is done here, it really did speak to me.

[lukeottevanger]

Well, I'm really glad you found something good here. You may be right about the music on its own - I must admit that this was music I first got hold of as an impressionable teenager, long before I saw the film, and it really grabbed me then. It might not do so now - but seeing the combination of music and image years later regalvanised my enthusiasm. It's one of those films which raises so many thoughts - and without words or plot to interrupt those thoughts, your mind wanders to distant and rewarding places throughout its entire length; it's almost as if the train-of-thought one follows as one watches the film is an integral but always-new part of the experience. And of course the music is a big part of that. One of the things about the music is that it parallels the nature/human/machine themes of the images it accompanies - it is machine-like itself, with its whirring cogs at different, related speeds, and its powerful, on-off electric organs; but at the same time we hear human voices, trumpets blown by human breath etc. etc. I'm sure that, subliminally, this is one of the reasons that the music is so effective in context.