View Single Post
Old 03-15-2012, 10:44 PM   #2161
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 2,019
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Otto Tune
Also, just for the record, I'm not sure a single phrase beat or bar was repeated in that VU song or that Link Wray one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marah Mag View Post
heroin by the velvets has a very nicely articulated structural development across its 7 minutes , even though it's only 2 chords.
I think that was kind of my point.

Especially with "Heroin", there's only two chords, but there is no way to make a loop-based equivalent. The whole song is just D-G, over and over, but there is no sample that anyone could take, no loop, no "riff"-- you can't even properly "score" it. It's just a guitar alternating two chords, and one drum. (there is also some screechy violin played by someone who can't play violin).

The musical "structure" is not merely simple, but stupid. If a friend of yours asked you what you thought of his "song", and then just played D-G-D-G... well, you might ask him whether everything is okay in his life.

"Heroin" manages to be a massive, epic, and intensely emotional 2-chord song that cannot be transcribed as riffs, samples, or even a score. Virtuosos cannot play it properly. Nobody can play it properly, even though the original was played badly and clumsily, full of half-fretted notes and sloppy-fingered chords. Playing it "correctly" ruins it.

This gets to the core of the artistry of recorded versus scored music. Once upon a time, the only way for a musician to make her voice known was either to do it, without amplification, for whoever was in earshot, or to try to write out her musical vision in a score that someone 1,000 miles away could try to reconstruct.

Modern recording and amplification technology enables a specificity of musical vision that was previously unattainable, except in immediate hearing range. Someone in 1850 might have performed something similar to "Heroin", but there is no way we could know about it, if they did. The written score would certainly not tell us much.
yep is offline   Reply With Quote