Deep Thoughts - Very Deep
A friend and colleague, Charles Dallaire, is an examiner for the IB program and passed these gems on to me. The IB, the International Baccalaureate, is a rigorous two-year program designed to prepare students for university. Alas, not all students or schools are up to the standard one would desire.
I leave it to you, dear reader, to choose the most delectable of these delicacies. As the American waiter says, with cheery but commanding tone, ENJOY!
The music does not take presidence over the voices the tone colour changes as the strings gain primacy
a single male voice begins to groan (Tibetan monks)
the tone is nastly (Tibetan monks)
to analyze this extract, one has to truely absorb the droning bass and allow the deep soothing melody to devour them
the melody is interrupted by fierce trills and disgusting trombone glisses (glissandos)
the composer Bartox (I wonder if he used botox?)
There lacks much rhythm after the intro and before the outro the voice do not range very much
the flute plays four eighteenth notes Sosticovage (Shostakovitch)
The perky new melody is quickly shut down by blaring brass(!)
. . . a cadence ending with all 4 parts on what sounds like an abstracted V chord
A new term: calmo tempo . . .
the piano returns with a softer, less angry repeat on the banging notes
Glisses from the hand lead the listener on a journey to mellow and soothing musical terms
The new atonality places this piece in the 20th century when composers began to take music and stretch it
Bartok was a very organic composer (did he compose biological music?)
The piece begins by creating a very forbidding mood . . . After taking 3 trips in Eastern Europe in the name of ethnomusicology, Bartok . . . . . . structure can be seen when the low strings begin to grow, then turn into the upper strings . . . this relates to Bartok’s structure of growth
All strings but bass are holding tremolos while the harp, clarinet and flute give chromatic scales which do more to break up the sense of beat than to give a sense of beat
Another example of Bartok’s style is his musical mother tongue
