Josh McNeill

Tag: piano

Meeting yourself.

January 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was just trying to figure out where a particular song I was working on last year for school went so I could finish it up and I came across something with the filename “New.” “That can’t be true,” I thought. So I opened it up and found something I wrote, uh, I don’t know when. The whole thing was very mysterious. I listened to it and thought, “This person has good taste,” and decided it would be worth sharing.

But seriously, it’s kinda strange coming across work you’ve forgotten that you’ve done. I looked at the notes that I had put down–and there are many–and I can’t figure out how I decided to put just those notes down. I don’t even know what I was trying to accomplish because there wasn’t so much as a single dynamic marking let alone a title or tempo indication. It was just a bunch of notes on a page that played something sorta familiar and comforting but also strangely alien. There was probably one day when putting that music together consumed all my time and energy and focus and now it’s just this thing I discovered.

It’s No 16 in the music section (or just click on No 16 [to the left]).

Singing about bombs.

October 14, 2008 / / 1 Comment

I know there aren’t many people who like opera or even know anything about it but I like it a lot. That being said, I feel the need to expose people to tidbits here and there that might break the stereotype of opera being some boring, stuffy, old crap with funny singing.

This, the Batter My Heart aria, is probably the most moving part of John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. This premiered in 2005. That’s right, people still write new operas. You might notice, if you bother to listen, that this sounds nothing like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Contrary to popular belief, classical music comes in many flavors and the well known flavors tend to be very old and out of use.

Adams is a post-minimalist composer. Essentially that means rhythm is very important to his sound as well as lingering on a chord for long periods of time. For anyone who’s into jazz, it’s a similar idea to modal jazz. For anyone who’s into rock, Sigur Ros is a good example of something in the same vein. The “post” part means he’s allowed to travel out of the boundaries of the rules that minimalism created that I’ve mentioned already.

Anyway, this aria is pretty high on energy which is not what one would normally think of when they hear the word “opera”. The words are taken from a poem by John Donne. What’s happening is Oppenheimer is combating the moral issues created in himself while creating the atomic bomb. Take a listen:

Just for fun, I think I’ll post one of John Adams’ early works for piano. This one I just like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3abjsYUkk4 (embedding was disabled for this one)

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