I got to thinking of music in which voices flow & wander. melisma. I wondered whether anything seems to unite otherwise various musics of which this is characteristic.
it's some of the earlier polyphonic we have from evropa, but Johannes Ockegham has always sounded to me impossibly futuristic -- 80s-font future, zappy-noise future, an unnatural horizon seen from a talking car. unbelievably complicated gorgeous almost incapacitating music. a favorite is the kyrie from his requiem, the first or second polyphonic one ever written.here, give it a listen.
for a contrast I find immediately appealing, listen here to a polychronion composed in wallachia in the early xviiith century. it's composed by a guy called Chrysaphios the Younger in honor of bishop Anthim the Iberian, an ethnic georgian (they call him ანთიმოზ ივერიელი, Antimoz Iverieli, id est, Anthim the Iberian, wakka wakka) polymath publisher & church leader, best remembered now when romania & georgia face off annually at rugby, in his honor. the echos this is sung in coincides surprisingly with a western major scale more than once.
& now here's in the gorge where the dog-rose blooms, a setting by the russischer komponist Vladimir Martynov of a text by the indispensable poet Velimir Xlebnikov.
this is a group of singing dervishes in pakistan. what this wildly various music seems to have in common is a central attention to contour, to the shape of the line the melody cuts thru air. but is that connection interesting?I don't know.
now picture this: a pair of corny guys who make music in new delhi & think computers are the new sharkskin. I like the midival punditz. they are not halfwayers. one does not want to like this song because it is bad. but punchy strings perhaps activate something. we go deep reptile. all I know is: world-beat. thank you for the punchy strings. I like to live the punchy strings. (in musicophilia -- I always enjoy the mishearing music ophelia -- Oliver Sacks discusses auditory hallucinations, which are, apparently, common. a lot of people hear punchy strings & garbagy patriotic music & can't stop. Armando hears something that sounds like the menu music on the dvd of television's john adams.)
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Alright, look, I'm not telling you how to run your blog, and certaily nobody understands the need to educate the masses regarding Dervishes more than I (we could go around to schools together, the PTA has deep pockets, think about it), but it is downright rude to post a JPEG of the 1986 skateboard extravaganza (and still Josh Brolin's greatest role) Thrashin' without any sort of, er, exegesis. Fortunately, this is something I know a great deal about. I mean, weren't we all there, sunny California of the mind, battling Skull-earring-wearing hooligans to the post-funk stylings of the Circle Jerks, the Chili Peppers, et al., West Side Story for the 80s flooded with guys wearing Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirts who looked way too tough to be wearing Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirts, longing for the hot, mullet-babe who went on to play Theresa Banks in the Twin Peaks movie? Oh, Thrashin,' in these days of bleak maturity and divet-less hairdos, where is your like? Seriously, it's like skateboarding action musicals from the 80s aren't even cool anymore. Don't be part of the problem, boychik, be part of the bonanza.
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