Many folks are talking about the most unwanted song: the 25-minute, schizophrenic work that only about 200 people on Earth are supposed to enjoy. I thought it was pretty cool and cackled to myself quite a bit. But the Zogby Music and Politics Poll (which I found via Avant Music News) on conservative, moderate, and liberal taste in entertainment was a lot more interesting to me. Apparently, conservatives, who favor action films, Fox News, and football video games, hate world music (under 5% would enjoy it), and like, more than any other musical genre, classical music (60% said it was their favorite). While polls are inherently reductionist, we still take them seriously, and the media wouldn't survive without them.
Stats like these make me appreciate even more somebody like Swedish multimedia artist Eric Bünger. In 2002, he put together a fascinating piece called variations on a theme by casey & finch, which I discovered while checking out Icebreaker's myspace page. In this piece for nonet, he emulates a CD skipping on the chorus to KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way I Like It." In picking a disco tune and using a techonological impetus, he's turned on the 'art music' world; to me the piece seems to throw away genre completely, and simply present something that's, well, really cool. Plenty of composers use technology to determine elements of their acoustic music, but I think this fairly simple, direct example is one of the best. Bünger makes all kinds of art, including this neat internet project Let them sing it for you. Here he is (on bass) with his band in action:
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1 comment:
this youtube video is great, i have often wondered what could be done musically with the concept of a CD skipping, great to see it transposed into live performance, now any piece of pop can be a minimalist masterpiece
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