I was excited about the first class. The playlist gave a sense of what the course was about. Plunderphonics as the second piece of music in the course was jarring in the way that they used ostenatos and Dolly Parton to pique your interest and then disrupt any notion that you ever had about Dolly Parton. Not that she really agreed to have her voice used for the mash-up, but it evokes a vision of her singing big boobs and bigger hair dressed in her Nashville finery while chaos erupts around her.
One of my favorite books that I have had to read for a class was the Barbara Tuchman book, The Proud Tower. In it she deals with art, music and culture leading up to World War I. One of the things she talks about is modernism like Stravinsky and the riots that would happen after a new, modern piece would appear. The outrage that the general public showed after seeing the modern dance paired with the new classical music was amazing. To think that people cared so passionately about composers and dance and propriety that they would rebel when they felt betrayed is refreshing. Stravinsky used ostenati and primitivism to turn the heads of his original audience. With impressionism, at least it was still music and yes the music might have painted with sound, but sound exploded on Stravinsky’s audience.
The mini projects should be fun. I am glad that for the first one I chose something I know relatively little about. Noise music is intriguing, and something that while you may know it when you hear it is difficult to define, and it seems even harder to research. The potluck was a good idea. We spent three hours eating food, talking and listening to noise music. I think that we all have an evolving sense of what noise music is and I hope that with further research (we specified more what we should be doing, so each person has their own piece of the project) we can learn even more. Slowly through research, class work and independent listening, what I may once have dismissed as dissonant sounds has evolved into music.