Seven Seconds or Less

Recently, a colleague shared an NPR story with me about how the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra had commissioned composer Mason Bates to write a very short "sonic logo" to be played by the orchestra. The story begins by connecting this to iconic logo sounds like the NBC and Netflix signatures which are really just a few gestures - less themes than motives. (The generic Netflix one barely qualities as a motive as there's really not much to it. It is iconic by the brute force of its ubiquity.) You may hear Bates' final product here:

Unexpect yourself

[I settled on the clumsy blog post title as an homage to the Philadelphia Orchestra's notoriously awful marketing tag from fifteen years ago.]

I've written before about my ambivalent attitude towards the "great" Joseph Haydn, a composer whose skill and influence I would never question, but whose music simply doesn't move me that often. Among other things, I find his supposed knack for humor to be pretty overrated, although he can hardly be blamed that an unexpectedly loud G Major chord (hear here at 0:37) has lost a little of its punch due to serious overexposure. 

We'll get back to that in a second. First, here's a little story from a few weeks back.