Listening Blog #5: Concert!

For anyone interested, you can find a more in-depth post about my own piece on my Tumblr music blog: musicblogben.tumblr.com

So, at last, our group’s Planetarium-Electro-Acoustic-Extravaganza was cancelled. But the music lived on! I downloaded all the files far past my bedtime last night and listened to them beginning to end from the comfort of my room. I couldn’t quite see the stars through my window, but I could watch the lights from the occasional car or truck as they drove past I-90.

Although it was unfortunate that we could not experience the piece surrounded by each other and friends, it created a uniquely intimate relationship to the music, I thought. I could really hone into the music itself as opposed to the social space around me, and I found myself still able to identify each composers artistic identities in their pieces. There’s so much I want to say to each and every composer and talk about their pieces, but I don’t want to get into each individual piece here and I would rather tell the composers my thoughts directly first before sharing publicly. Suffice it to say that each piece well represented each composer’s musical background and presented different musical intents. Some more linearly told a story only using a small handful of sounds, stretched and morphed in lots of ways, and other were densely packed with all sorts of samples in an anxiety-provoking fever dream.