Before leaping into an analysis, however, it is probably wise to survey Futurist music and its objectives.
After Marinetti launched Futurism by publishing its first manifesto, Balilla Pratella penned the "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians". The polemic attaches Futurist ideals (rejection of past art, youthful recklessness, artistic liberty, etc) to music, but offers uncharacteristically little technical direction.
However, in 1913, Luigi Russolo published "The Art of Noises", a much more specific manifesto for Futurist composers. Russolo's manifesto, formatted as a letter to Pratella, charts the development of music towards dissonance. He proposes that as industry grows, people will prefer increasingly dissonant polyphonies. Eventually, Russolo writes, people will prefer "noise-sound [italics his]", a pitched vibration that mimics the industrial sounds surrounding modern men. Machines that produce these sounds were only theoretical when Russolo wrote, but he later constructed instruments called intonarumori that produced the percussive sounds he imagined.
Unfortunately, Russolo's music was not well received by the mainstream. But, because he was fittingly ahead of his time, his pamphlet is still studied by modern musicians.
It anticipates electronic music. Russolo imagined six new families of sound, comparable to the families of the modern orchestra, determined by their relation to industrial noise. Fluxus musicians, like John Cage, were heavily influenced by Russolo's writings and used them to shape their stochastic sound experiments. Fluxus music took a backseat to minimalism though, and Cage's contemporary, Steve Reich (possibly Stevens' most obvious influence), began experimenting with synthesizers and the loop structures that form the foundation of electronic music.
Although modern synthesizer sounds are distinguished by waveform and other hardware-dependent characteristics, the present electronic avant-garde still fills Russolo's idealistic prescription surprisingly well. Concrete musicians sample industrial sounds to create music, and modern groups like Animal Collective craft gurgling and hissing sounds synthetically, giving their electronic music an ironically organic timbre. Steven's Adz is written in this avant-garde vein.
The album sports a simple bookend structure that frames the narrative of emotional development. The first track opens with a clean electric guitar, which is soon supplemented by pizzicato strings and a prepared piano (one of John Cage's favorite instruments); and the lyrics introduce the theme of unspeakable emotion (a la Wittgenstein's aesthetic philosophy).
The album later ends with clean guitar tracks, but in many ways the seemingly mirrored arrangement has matured. The vocals have a delay effect, and the lyrics sing hopefully about the prospect of future relationships.
The reconciliation of electronics with an otherwise acoustic arrangement at the album's end is Stevens' conceit. The album's almost eighty-minute mid-section is filled with an electronic chaos that matches the singer's emotional chaos.
The second track has a fair share of gurgles, burps, and growls that fall in line with the aesthetics of aforementioned Animal Collective. But the third track's arrangement is a modern manifesto of Futurism. It opens with industrial hissing, as if a monstrous machine is booting up to swallow our ears; and the entrance of acoustic instruments settles nothing. Trombones scream slides and seconds while flutes trill a dissonance from the Rite of Spring. All of this backs a choral arc that could be a triumphant theme of discovery from an action film. Here the title track announces, we are adventuring into the musical future as we adventure into the singer's soul.
As the album progresses, we are treated to two relatively acoustic sections before the ultimate bookend. The first of these lulls is the mostly vocal track, Now That I'm Older. It is arranged, especially in the beginning, like a hymn. All of the voicings are traditional, but the role of the delay pedal is foregrounded. Artifacts of pitch-shifted repeats squelch high in the mix as the delayed accompaniment crawls to catch up with the lead vocals. This way of showing old age and new wisdom, by perverting an old form with new technology so that it feels dragged, would have been unacceptable to ancient ears, but it is quite successful in our futuristic era.
The second hint of an acoustic sound is the track Vesuvius. It opens with a piano and vocals; though Stevens' voice has been heavily multi-tracked and the delay effect is applied, it seems quite acoustic relative to the previous sounds. However, industrial percussion is incorporated into the second verse and the first instumental interlude is a LFO-laiden synthesizer solo. The song screams with electronics in the first crescendo, which dies amid gastric synth sounds that transition to the song's second half: an ironic instrumentation recalling the parable of the pied-piper. The subversive lyrics calling the listener to "follow [Stevens] downward" are sung over synthesizers that literally portamento down. This is probably the album's lyrical nadir, and its unsustainable sorrow is soon dissipated by the track I Want To Be Well which, as its title suggests, rejects the depressive mood as the singer begins the search for emotional stability that ends in the final, epic track.
Overall, Stevens' effort juxtaposes high and low culture by seating the symphony next to synthesizers, and alluding to complex philosophies in love-song lyrics. The album is a piece of the modern avant-garde that borrows sounds from the archaic avant-garde. The future is here, but it is not Marinetti's future: it is Stevens'.
Unfortunately, Russolo's music was not well received by the mainstream. But, because he was fittingly ahead of his time, his pamphlet is still studied by modern musicians.
It anticipates electronic music. Russolo imagined six new families of sound, comparable to the families of the modern orchestra, determined by their relation to industrial noise. Fluxus musicians, like John Cage, were heavily influenced by Russolo's writings and used them to shape their stochastic sound experiments. Fluxus music took a backseat to minimalism though, and Cage's contemporary, Steve Reich (possibly Stevens' most obvious influence), began experimenting with synthesizers and the loop structures that form the foundation of electronic music.
Although modern synthesizer sounds are distinguished by waveform and other hardware-dependent characteristics, the present electronic avant-garde still fills Russolo's idealistic prescription surprisingly well. Concrete musicians sample industrial sounds to create music, and modern groups like Animal Collective craft gurgling and hissing sounds synthetically, giving their electronic music an ironically organic timbre. Steven's Adz is written in this avant-garde vein.
The album sports a simple bookend structure that frames the narrative of emotional development. The first track opens with a clean electric guitar, which is soon supplemented by pizzicato strings and a prepared piano (one of John Cage's favorite instruments); and the lyrics introduce the theme of unspeakable emotion (a la Wittgenstein's aesthetic philosophy).
The album later ends with clean guitar tracks, but in many ways the seemingly mirrored arrangement has matured. The vocals have a delay effect, and the lyrics sing hopefully about the prospect of future relationships.
The reconciliation of electronics with an otherwise acoustic arrangement at the album's end is Stevens' conceit. The album's almost eighty-minute mid-section is filled with an electronic chaos that matches the singer's emotional chaos.
The second track has a fair share of gurgles, burps, and growls that fall in line with the aesthetics of aforementioned Animal Collective. But the third track's arrangement is a modern manifesto of Futurism. It opens with industrial hissing, as if a monstrous machine is booting up to swallow our ears; and the entrance of acoustic instruments settles nothing. Trombones scream slides and seconds while flutes trill a dissonance from the Rite of Spring. All of this backs a choral arc that could be a triumphant theme of discovery from an action film. Here the title track announces, we are adventuring into the musical future as we adventure into the singer's soul.
As the album progresses, we are treated to two relatively acoustic sections before the ultimate bookend. The first of these lulls is the mostly vocal track, Now That I'm Older. It is arranged, especially in the beginning, like a hymn. All of the voicings are traditional, but the role of the delay pedal is foregrounded. Artifacts of pitch-shifted repeats squelch high in the mix as the delayed accompaniment crawls to catch up with the lead vocals. This way of showing old age and new wisdom, by perverting an old form with new technology so that it feels dragged, would have been unacceptable to ancient ears, but it is quite successful in our futuristic era.
The second hint of an acoustic sound is the track Vesuvius. It opens with a piano and vocals; though Stevens' voice has been heavily multi-tracked and the delay effect is applied, it seems quite acoustic relative to the previous sounds. However, industrial percussion is incorporated into the second verse and the first instumental interlude is a LFO-laiden synthesizer solo. The song screams with electronics in the first crescendo, which dies amid gastric synth sounds that transition to the song's second half: an ironic instrumentation recalling the parable of the pied-piper. The subversive lyrics calling the listener to "follow [Stevens] downward" are sung over synthesizers that literally portamento down. This is probably the album's lyrical nadir, and its unsustainable sorrow is soon dissipated by the track I Want To Be Well which, as its title suggests, rejects the depressive mood as the singer begins the search for emotional stability that ends in the final, epic track.
Overall, Stevens' effort juxtaposes high and low culture by seating the symphony next to synthesizers, and alluding to complex philosophies in love-song lyrics. The album is a piece of the modern avant-garde that borrows sounds from the archaic avant-garde. The future is here, but it is not Marinetti's future: it is Stevens'.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Blog posts are living documents. You can be part of that life by adding to the discussion.