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counterpoint and ironies
Although most Western music for the past, oh, I don't know, roughly four hundred years or so has been written with a focus on harmony as its predominant structural element, you could make an argument that turntablism, by its very nature, marks a return to the musical principle of counterpoint: viewed in a certain light, the way turntablism takes rhythmic or melodic fragments and juxtaposes them with other fragments or with duplicate versions of itself could be said to be almost round-like or fugue-like.
The contrapuntal effect of musical irony could be said to apply to much turntable material:
"Counterpoint is one of the most essential means, in musical composition, for the generation of musical ironies; a melodic fragment, heard alone, may make a particular impression, but when it is heard simultaneously with other melodic ideas, or combined in unexpected ways with itself, as in canon or fugue, surprising new facets of meaning are revealed."
(from Wikipedia)
A nice example comes to us in the form of this week's Friday MP3, "Jukebox Capriccio," a piece made by turntablist Christian Marclay in 1985, which jumbles together big band horns, skating-rink organ, tinny New Wave beats, sundry bits of exotica, and scrawls of white noise into something that "means" something far more complicated than any of the records might manage individually. (This piece, along with many other pieces of radical counterpoint, are available on the wonderful 1997 Marclay anthology Records 1981-1989, on Atavistic.)
Listen: "Jukebox Capriccio" Labels: audio, mp3s, music_commentary |
Friday, May 27, 2005
10:29 AM
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