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.

This just in!

Although I would not have anticipated this years ago when I was considering what I'd do with my life, it turns out that a new part of my high school job this year is running a livestreamed morning news show. It's involved a significant learning curve - still curving - but it's also been fun to work with the technology and, especially, the live performance aspect. Of course, I have a lot of experience performing as a musician, and I think some of those "thinking in the moment" skills transfer over. Managing scene changes, fades/dissolves, cueing announcers - there is a musical aspect to managing the timing of all of these elements.

I've got a little Liszt...to add to this list

In my previous post, I mentioned that I've long been naturally drawn to tune connections. Back in "The Aughts," when the blog was young, I wrote a series of what I called "Tune Theft" posts lightheartedly using the term "theft" to describe instances in which a given melody seemed to borrow quite a bit from a previous melody. As so often on the blog, I was interested in how it is that a given set of notes can carry a specific identity which can nonetheless be repurposed to create something quite different, much as we just saw with four notes from "Swing low, sweet chariot." You may find the original list, mostly from 2007 with some other additions grafted in, here.

A whole new world

Once again, one blog post topic has generated unexpected journeys down a path I'd never intended. You could say that exploring the harmonic progression in four bars of Dvořák's "New World" Symphony opened up whole new worlds of things to write about. At first I thought this would just be a little postscript post, but it has resulted in a few more creations than I'd imagined.

The topic of the day is this: what is actually "new world"-ish about Dvořák's 9th Symphony "From the New World?"