![]() ![]() But either way, a careful listen to I Giorni reveals that there is a subtle musical intelligence at play. ![]() Now our bookshop joker may or may not be culturally insensitive enough to dismiss Mande musical traditions as A Land Modulation Forgot. He mostly keeps within one key centre, and manipulates textural figurations in ways that bring out the sound colour of the instrument. I Giorni is not African pastiche, but it is interesting how Einaudi uses the piano much like the 21-string kora, with its far more limited harmonic range. The sleeve notes describe a car journey near Bamako with another kora player, Toumani Diabate, where he explained the story behind an ancient Mande song playing on the radio. I had completely forgotten that I Giorni was itself inspired by a trip to Mali. Suddenly, with this serendipity of juxtaposition, Einaudi’s music started to make sense in a different kind of way. By chance it was straight after listening to Mali In Oak by Tunde Jegede, a kora player I have written about here. 1700s music prodigy played symphony memory heard once tv#Besides songs like Despactio, how many musical traditions around the world do not use modulation to a great extent? It must surely be many, especially when – like European music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance – the capabilities of instruments do not easily facilitate it.Īfter a gap of several years, I recently revisited I Giorni, whose title track tinkles away in the background to BBC TV trailers. Words my A Level teacher might have used to my fellow student, had he been less kind.īut to notice only a lack of modulation in Einaudi’s music reveals a curiously insular view. ‘The Land Modulation Forgot’ was the mocking sticker I once noticed attached to his drawer in the music section of a London book shop. To some, Einaudi is understood as part of a ‘dumbed down’ wave of classical crossover music. The remarkable fan base it has gained, including a large cohort of young listeners, is something that should give pause for thought. ![]() I came to admire Einaudi’s piano music as much for its gentle poetry as its audacious simplicity. His albums Le Onde (The Waves) and I Giorni (The Days) had been taken up by Classic FM, and he blended the kind of chord sequences that saturate pop music with minimalist piano textures. Whatever the explanation, the priorities of our A Level were made clear when we learnt to compose perfect cadences in the style of chorales from 18th-century Leipzig.Īt around this same time, I became aware of the pianist-composer Ludovico Einaudi. Hip-hop – by one measure the world’s most popular music genre – puts more emphasis on lyrical content, rhythm, and the sonic possibilities of sampling. Perhaps harmonic structure, with the potential to ‘modulate’ between keys, has simply become a less important musical parameter. It could be that a more rootless approach to tonality resonates with the zeitgeist in some way. Perhaps this is just a matter of changing fashions. Instead, Olivet suggests, much of it meanders or cycles around, ‘like a lost monk chanting in the woods’. ![]() Another article by Dean Olivet identifies a decline of traditional ‘functional’ harmony in modern pop music. Wayne Marshall has noted how the four-chord sequence used in the 2017 hit single Despacito has become remarkably widespread in recent years. Deeply felt self-expression, an idea which makes studying music attractive, was not what we were there for.Īnd yet the simplicity of my classmate’s song was certainly of its time. In other words: the song was lovely, but it did not tick the right boxes for varied harmonic structure that, say, an Elton John song might do. This kind of minimal style, he explained, did not exhibit the variety of techniques that examiners would be looking to see that students were aware of. The accompaniment was simple – a few repeating chords, giving prominence to her expressive voice.Īt the end, the teacher remarked that it had been very effective, but it would not be a good submission as composition coursework. One of the students sat at the piano and sang a song she had written. Shared under Wikimedia Commons.Īt some point while I was studying for music A Level, we had a class in which we were each performing for constructive criticism. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |