Below The Bridge

Not that my blog title is in any way bizzare, but I like double meanings and that's what it is...

I love talking about and sharing music, at least that's what I think most of my brain is filled with, but the outlook is bleak for finding mates who share the same enthusiasm for weirdass classical music as I do. At work I was trying to describe a composer I listen to to another usher. To put it best, Giacinto Scelsi writes music around a note, for example A, using accidentals, quarter-tones or any method to slightly alter the pitch; and instead of creating melody/harmony by changing the pitch (A,B,C,D,E,F,G) he would change how the note is played. Yeah, sounds monotonous and hideous already. I inevitably gave up trying to make it sound like the next iteration of Haydn and lent her a CD instead. It wasn't epic fail, more like trying to describe the sea to a blind person.

A few days later I wrote back with some bits about the composer and was reminded of this pretty wicked technique he used on the violins in a piece called 'Ohoi' (for 16 strings, from 1966). I don't have any formal training besides a love of music FOREVER and hoarding CD booklets like pogs. Now this recording on YouTube isn't the one I know, but it'll do. Around 7:20 if you crank it up you can hear bows making rubbing sounds below the bridge. If you play ANY stringed instrument you'd know that you can't make notes on this part because the strings are too tight. In my gigantic opinion, he uses the rubbing effect of the bows in attempt to create sound which is nearly out of aural hearing. MP3 and its psychoacoustic compression is similar where it throws out samples in the lows and highs, but we still perceive the information as being there because of how our hearing works. Anyway, I thought it was a great way of expressing something in the music that couldn't literally be played (a transcendence?).

So that's the title of my blog; if you'd rather think of it as a gremlin with one claw ready to grab your heel and pull you into a canal, go for it.

Why Exist? To have a blog where I can unabashedly post thoughts and not cater to just a photo blog which I had in the past. This kept me from really integrating my life into it and since I don't know what the hell Photography is after two years maybe it'll make me a better Photographer. What I think I know about Photography is; in regards to technical, composition, aesthetics, blah: when it matters, none of that matters.

My old blog: http://verylittlebrain.blogspot.com/