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ADITYA

Poem Electroniqué Edgar Varèse

This 8-minute composition was created for an attraction in the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. I chose this composition is because its the first song that came up on my Spotify when I searched for “Edgar Varèse”. The composition was an experiment in “liberation of sound”. Most sounds used in this composition would not be considered “musical”

The first 90 seconds seemed a lot like what we are currently doing in class: discontinuous noises, however, unlike what we have heard/made in class so far, it had a strangely harmonic feel to it. At 1:50 I felt a distinctly psychedelic pattern which was followed by a shift to a musical simulation of traffic noises. So far this composition was giving me an impression of a SciFi movie soundtrack. At 3:40 and 6:50 he uses the voice as an instrument. This was amazing to hear this as my favourite artist Kanye West has been known to use similar techniques in many of his songs including “Jesus Walks” and “I thought about killing you today”. At 4:15 the sound felt like a horror movie soundtrack. The overall effect felt like the moment of conflict in the story this composition was trying to convey. It was at 6:15 that I heard the first distinct instruments namely, the drums. The composition ends with a crescendo of noise and stops with an abrupt silence.

Klavierstuck V, Work no. 4 Karlheinz Stockhausen

Despite trying to read about this, I was only able to get a limited understanding of this composition. The Klavierstücke (German for "Piano Pieces") constitute a series of nineteen compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While this Klavierstuck was composed for the piano, later compositions in the set were composed for the synthesizer as Stockhausen considered them a natural successor of the Piano.

This specific piece had a definite cinematic feel to it as well. This was a very interesting song that was not based on repetition. Catchy songs are catchy (from Beethoven's symphonies to whatever’s #1 on Spotify right now) because of a recognizable pattern of repetition. This composition while not exactly “catchy” was quite engaging.