💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~scotchsour › 2023-08-28-MusicInBrutalSpaces.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:16:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I keep ending up in a music practice room.
Our practice rooms were 8-foot-square dungeons, housing a perfectly tuned but beat-to-shit upright piano. The walls were made of cement blocks, the floor was concrete. Some didn’t even have a piano, just an abandoned music stand, ready to tip over at any moment.
Of course, the uni had better practice buildings, with soundproof comforts. Cushioned benches, painted walls (can you IMAGINE?) and a baby grand for every room. But you had to get on a waiting list for that. You also had to prove you were actually taking a music class. You couldn’t just bring your buddies, eat cheetos, and make up songs for your garage band. You had to have a reason. Plus, you only had an hour, two at most.
So most of us chose to slum it at the dungeon building. It had paper thin walls, acoustically speaking, so you could hear some amazing performances down the hall. Someone pounding out Rachmaninoff, blowing some Charlie Parker, stuff like that. Mostly, though, it was scales and the occasional second-major squeaking sour things into the air — and this was okay, because music: it was alive.
In my dream last night, I sat in a much bigger practice room than these. Oddly, it was still an oubliette, rays of light casting down from a gridiron hole in the ceiling. But it was chamber-sized, with a hefty 10 people or so in audience, sitting in pretty decent plastic chairs. An actress sat in a stool “on stage,” waiting blankly like a slouched marionette, ready to come alive.
It was luxurious.
Her tune, which I wrote, had the kind of lyrics you find in an old Oscar & Hammerstein. Real Oklahoma! type stuff, with the biddidy-bees and bopity-boos. I think she sang about how goofy love is, but isn’t it grand anyway?
But underneath, the music pulled this weird-ass Schöenberg thing, chords crawling unctuously into the air. It used a Bohlen-Pierce base with microtonal riffs, fully subverting the lyrics.
I was proud of it. THIS was “musical satire.” The holy grail. My friends might tell you: I’m always on about how music “can’t be satirical” because it's too honest. You need facial expressions or lyrics to fully sell the “side eye” — and even with those, it’s hard to pull off.
The actress designed the choreography, which was elegant and plain. She began in a girly fluster, then looked at us. The quartet and piano plimped out a chord. And with this weird sonic thing bending its way behind her, she wondered about love. Then she stood, clasped her hands to her heart. Looked up at the angstloch, and asked why, oh why, does he have to be this way: so annoying and so beautiful at once?
You get the picture.
The piece was about 6 minutes long. My reviews were fantastic (that’s how I knew this was a dream). They called it “sickening, but in the most wry and beautiful way possible.”
They told me to work on the orchestration and address the aimless sounding bits. The actress, an opera major, walked up to me afterwards and thanked me for giving her a “challenging” piece — I took this to mean that she hated it to the core.
In conclusion, it was a dream. I’ve been having a lot of “practice room” dreams lately. Don’t know what they mean, because frankly, how could I?