On this episode of Strings and Things, Angela Babin drops by to work on a Melody Maker that hasn’t been out and about in years, while our host Patrick Grant restrings his studio-weary Les Paul. They’ll swap stories about the weirdest gigs they’ve played in New York City, and talk about how numbers and math inspire Angela’s current compositions. Then they’ll amp up for a special Strings and Things duet.
Since picking up the electric guitar at 14 years old, over the years Angela’s performed in a wide range of venues, from Folk City and CBGBs, to BAM and the Berlin Jazz Festival. She entered the downtown New York music scene with the band Off Beach, and played guitar in the nine-piece experimental rock group The Ordinaires. The Ordinaires were compared to Philip Glass, Captain Beefheart, Henry Mancini, Husker Du and Stravinsky – all at the same time! You may remember their cover of “Kashmir” was all over MTV at the time:
Randy’s going to tell us about the history of the EBow and where you’ve heard it before, and we’ll hear about trying to be an environmentally conscious guitarist when you also have a jones for tube electronics.
In the late 70’s through the late 80’s, Randy was an active member of the Downtown NYC scene with John Zorn, Kramer, Ann Magnuson, Ralph Carney, Daved Hild, Coby Batty of the Fugs, and many others. He’s co-written, recorded, performed with members of Gong, The Waitresses, The Fugs, Psychedelic Furs, and Captain Howdy. Randy joined Magnuson and Kramer in Bongwater as a recording and touring member of the band. He formed a duo called Bowing with composer and electro-acoustic violist Martha Mooke, and he also co-founded EBQ: The Electronic Bow Quartet. He currently performs with Klyph Black, Joe Delia, and The Complete Unknowns, a group celebrating the music of Bob Dylan. In 2010, Randy founded the 2D/3D Blu-Ray department of DuArt Film and Video. You can visit him at http://www.rah3.com
On this episode of Strings and Things, we have the prolific composer/guitarist Nick Didkovsky, founder of the rock ensemble Doctor Nerve, and an agent of destruction in the grindcore outfit Vomit Fist.
While changing the strings on his B.C. Rich Stealth guitar, he tells our host, Patrick Grant, how he uses the programming language HMSL to compose music, and explains the virtues of his single humbucker pickup. Then Nick and Patrick plug into some Vox Amps for an electrifying duet.
Listen to an extended version of “Episode 4 Petromyzontiformes”, the piece featured at the end of the episode:
BONUS! Listen to Nick’s brief demo of the Stealth guitar:
Nick also plays with the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet and composed music for the Bang On A Can All-Stars, Meridian Arts Ensemble, ETHEL, and others. He’s a co-founder of the $100 Guitar Project with Chuck O’Meara. Find out more about Nick and his many musical projects at didkovsky.com.
On the premiere episode of Strings and Things, composer/guitarist Tony Geballe stops by to change the strings on his custom-built Nelson Fidelis TG1 electric guitar, while our host Patrick Grant re-strings his Rickenbacker 330. Tony tells us about his first guitar hero, and how he started playing in a Progressive Darkwave band. Then the Vox amps come out and they perform an excerpt from Tony’s score for a stage version of Faust.
International sTRANGE mUSIC Day 2014 Performance Soiree Sunday, August 24th @ SPECTRUM, 121 Ludlow St., NYC Tickets $15 – Doors open at 6:30 pm with trouble to begin at 7:00 pm
PDF Press Release NEWSFLASH: All attendees of the INTERNATIONAL STRANGE MUSIC DAY performance at Spectrum NYC on Aug. 24th are eligible to enter our FREE raffle. The Grand Prize? A single ticket to the KING CRIMSON concert on Sept. 21st in NYC, Orchestra Center, Row GG, Seat 101. Why only one ticket? Out of sympathy for the poor date that always gets dragged along. We’re showing some mercy.
AUGUST 24th is International sTRANGE mUSIC Day. It’s a real holiday, yes it is. To celebrate, some of the NYC area’s best and brightest composers and performers are getting together to have a very unserious session of music making. This as an opportunity to for them to share unusual sounds, unusual instrumentation, and unusual compositions rarely heard or new ones that will never be heard from again.
For the 2014 celebration, creator Patrick Grant/Peppergreen Media partners up once again with NYC’s Lower East Side high-tech chamber-salon Spectrum NYC where the 2012 event was held. This is the perfect venue for such an event since its capabilities will enable strange musicians and performers of all stripes to push the envelope into uncharted territory.
Celebration in São Paulo: Making this a truly international event, there will be a Strange Music Day sister spectacle taking place at exactly the same time at the Paco Das Artes in São Paulo, Brazil presented by the Orchestra Descarrego. More iNFO via their Facebook event page HERE.
A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA
is in town, but has not been engaged
MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS
were in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned
A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION
may be expected; in fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.
NYC PERFORMERS TO INCLUDE…
Cristian Amigo & Angela Babin
Guitarists Angela Babin and Cristian Amigo perform Empty Form Duo #5, a piece based on the non-dualistic idea of form/emptiness. Babin was a founding mother of the band The Ordinaires who received critical acclaim in the 80s in the Downtown NY music scene. She met Amigo (Guggenheim Fellow, guitarist, and songwriter) while playing Elliott Sharp’s Syndakit. During an extended wait for the subway they formed their collaboration for the Gotham Roots Orchestra via a mutual appreciation for the blues. They will keep it sTRANGE.
Lynn Bechtold
Violinist/composer Lynn Bechtold has appeared in recital throughout NA and Europe, and has premiered works by composers including Gloria Coates, George Crumb, John Harbison, Alvin Lucier, and Morton Subotnick. She is a member of groups including Zentripetal Duo, Bleecker StQ, Miolina, and SEM, and her performances have been broadcast on various TV/radio, including WNYC, 30 Rock, CBS Morning Show, and Good Day NY. She has appeared at venues from Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall to LPR and Joe’s Pub. Her electroacoustic compositions have been performed on festivals such as the Composers Concordance Festival and Kathleen Supove’s Music With A View.
Jason Belcher Jason Belcher is a composer & multi-instrumentalist who studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He led several performance projects as a student, including a revival of music by Burr Van Nostrand, a composer whose most adventurous scores went unheard for 42 years. As a result of this project, a disc of Burr’s work was released by New World Records in 2013. Belcher currently lives and works in New York, where he is active in projects with other young improvisers.
Tom Burnett
Chime’s Swing Number 89, inspired by a set of chimes given to Tom Burnett in 1989 by the late performer and artist Winchester Chimes, is part of a continuing series of performances dating back to 1989. This performance is coincidentally the eight-ninth. Other venues have included the Bardavon Theatre, Joe’s Pub, the Kitchen, the occasional rock quarry, church, and the Canal Street subway station.
Ken Butler
Ken Butler is an artist and musician whose Hybrid musical instruments, performances, and installations explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, altered images, sounds and silence. He has performed and exhibited throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe including The Stedelijk Museum, The Prada Foundation in Venice, Mass MoCA, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum, The Queens Museum, Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Museum as well as in South America and Asia. Butler has been reviewed in The NY Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian, and Sculpture Magazine and has been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC’s The Tonight Show.
Constance Cooper
Constance Cooper improvises instrumentally and vocally, in concert —today, Solo With Stadium Blanket — and for theater, using two keyboards tuned a quartertone apart. She belongs to ArtStar, which includes live painting and audience drawing, and to the women’s a cappella acoustic trio Arc Welding. Some years ago she designed an improvisation work for the cellist Ernst Reijseger, who began the performance, then stood up, walked around while playing, and then deliberately got entangled with the branches of a large potted plant. He later said that he had always wanted to be a tree.
Glenn Cornett
Glenn Cornett runs Spectrum NYC, the performance venue/gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that supports innovation and virtuosity in the arts. He is a composer/performer, playing guitar, keyboards, electronics, etc. Founder of two biotechnology companies – Pastorus (autism, other CNS disorders) and Navitas (cardiovascular, metabolic diseases). He has worked at McKinsey and Eli Lilly. Education: MD with Distinction in Research from the University of Michigan; PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, dissertation on human deep-brain responses to musical stimuli. He has a black belt in karate and has run nine marathons, including Istanbul in November 2013.
GangBhang
GangBhang is a collective of inattentive plus ultra performers from different “walks” of life that include secular and non-secular attitudes and fashions. This time presents a very exciting, but hopefully boring, performance with the very devices that (usually) break our connection with the real world. The performers are Balldie on iPhone, Mojas on Maschine, and Preachermac on iPad.
portrait by Ted Berkowitz
Patrick Grant Patrick Grant creates musical works that are a synthesis of classical, popular, and world musical styles that have found place in concert halls, film, theater, dance, and visual media. Over the last three decades, his music has moved from post-punk and classically bent post-minimal styles, through Balinese-inspired gamelan and microtonality, to ambient, electronic soundscapes involving many layers of acoustic and amplified instruments. He is the creator of International Strange Music Day (August 24) and the creator/pioneer of the electric guitar procession Tilted Axes.
Amy & Alex Hamlin
Amy & Alex Hamlin are a husband and wife team who enjoy their cats, Walter & Boris, their garden, & traveling to exotic places. They are the founders of the 7-piece soul/rock band Amy Lynn & The Gunshow. The duo is enjoying experimenting more with voice and baritone sax with the music from The Gunshow. Together and apart they have played all over the country with acts such as Yo La Tengo, St. Vincent, Beth Hart, Duffy, The National, Spoon, and Red Barrat.
Niloufar Nourbakhsh Niloufar Nourbakhsh started learning piano at the age of nine at Sarang Institute of Music located in Karaj, Iran. At the age of fifteen, she won the 2nd Prize of Iran’s National Piano Biennale Competition and performed at Tehran’s Roudaki Concert Hall twice as a participant of The Music Festival from Classical to Modern. She is a music and math graduate of Goucher College and Oxford University. She has participated in numerous music festivals as a pianist and a composer such as New Paltz Piano Summer, Atlantic Music Festival, and the Rhymes with Opera Workshop. She is currently working at Brooklyn Music School Summer Institute as a teaching artist.
Lorin Roser
Lorin Roser is a multimedia artist fascinated with the expression of mathematics. He utilizes algorithms in his musical compositions and physical simulations in his 3D animations. Recent music is created with realtime manipulation of polynomials. This work began in the 80s and was ported to Reaktor in 2004. The realtime was not possible until recent advances in computing. As a musician, Roser has performed at CBGB’s, Bowery Poetry Club, the Emily Harvey Foundation with Larry Litt, White Box with Elliott Sharp, and events for curator/performance artist A. Schloss.
Zero Boy Zero Boy is an East Village icon who uses a unique blend of sound and mime, the results being something akin to a performed comic book. He can be seen on the upcoming Nickelodeon show Alien Dawn as the evil Dr. Drago. He appeared Off-Broadway in the Yllana Production of ‘666’, and has performed regularly on NPR’s The Next Big Thing in a special “Stump Zero Boy” segment. He has been seen on the Fox and Friends, Good Day New York and MTV.
“In 1999 I declared August 24th randomly as Strange Music Day. It gave me an opportunity to come up with a cool graphic and drive home a point that I still believe in to this day: it is always good to listen and play music that we are unfamiliar with. It keeps our ears and outlook fresh. Around 2002, I started noticing that various summer schools were picking up on it as an actual holiday….Once I started seeing postings coming from Europe, I changed the name to International Strange Music Day. It’s just been getting bigger every year….” – Patrick Grant
“Recently I’ve been taking it a step further and we had the first International Strange Music Day Performance Soiree in 2012. I asked the New York new music community to submit their ideas and apply for spots on the concert. I wanted to see a lot of new music notables perform music that they were not usually associated with, to be willing to explore uncomfortable places, to reveal their guilty pleasures and hidden parlor tricks to the public. It was a blast! It was just one those things that came together and happened so well. I and everybody involved are already looking forward to raising the bar for the next event. You have been warned!” – International sTRANGE mUSIC Day creator, Patrick Grant, Exploring the Metropolis
“International Strange Music Day was created by Patrick Grant, a New York City musician. The premise is simple: to get people to play and listen to types of music they have never experienced before. The ‘strange’ part can mean either unfamiliar or bizarre – the choice is entirely yours. Patrick believes broadening people’s musical spectrums can also change the way we look at other aspects of life – his mantra is ‘listening without prejudice’. This growing movement has concerts, a record label and strong support from summer schools, where it is appreciated as a great way to stimulate young minds. Have you ever wanted to combine a tight Wonder Woman costume, a frozen turkey drumstick and an inflatable wildebeest into a percussion concert? International Strange Music Day gives you the perfect excuse. What you do with these items once the music stops, of course, is your business… “ – Days of the Year
International Strange Music Day, August 24, 2013
this year dedicated to children (young and old)
Greetings People of Earth,
It’s been 15 years since I first flew the Strange Music banner during our inaugural concert at the Knitting Factory in New York City. Since then, ‘Strange Music’ has become many things: a record label, concert series, a social irritant, but most famously, a day to stretch one’s ears by either listening to or playing music that is new to you. It’s all relative.
Since this holiday observance came into existence during an otherwise holiday-less month, it’s actually been picked up by a number of small organizations around the world: a blog here and there, a growing throng of adventurous radio stations, but mostly by a number of summer school programs searching for a creative way to occupy idle hands and ears. An internet search will turn up pages and pages of such schools.
I urge you to spend a moment with your young ones and blow their little minds with something exceptionally challenging to listen to, especially if you do not normally do so. If there are some instruments around, make up a song for the day. If not, make an instrument from stuff you have in the house.
A small gesture such as this would provide memories lasting a lifetime. The evidence of the benefits of engaging children in music has filled volumes. No reason to keep it simple: the stranger the better. Young ears have no prejudice.
You say that you DON’T have any kids around? Then do it for yourself. It will keep YOU young. Really.
This week on Public Radio International’s STUDIO 360:
I speak with Jon Pareles, chief pop music critic for the NY Times, about the History of Audio Effects in Pop Music over the last 60 years in a segment hosted by Kurt Andersen and produced by Jocelyn Gonzales.
Locally, it airs in New York City on Saturdays at 4 PM on WNYC 93.9 FM. National times for the week will vary on PRI’s affiliates.
Here’s a link where it’s available as a stream or as a podcast. Check it out if you can. Thx.
Probably the buzz-iest music project I’ve come across in the last few days is the new, interactive “location aware” album just released as an app by the band Bluebrain. It’s called The National Mall, and the only way you can hear the album is to download its app and listen to the piece as you walk around the National Mall in Washington DC. Based on the GPS information on your phone, the music will loop or change as you stand still or move around the area’s monuments and attractions. The Washington Post explains it thus:
“The app contains nearly three hours of meticulously composed music that transforms as you navigate 264 zones across the Mall. If you stay put, the song remains the same — music will loop in intervals that last two to eight minutes, depending on your position.
The point is to keep moving. Approach the Capitol dome, and you’ll hear an eerie drone. Climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s twinkling harps and chiming bells. As you wander from zone to zone, ambient washes dovetail into trip-hop beats and back again. The music follows you without interruption, the way a soundtrack follows a protagonist through a movie or a video game. When you leave the Mall, the sound evaporates into silence.”
The National Mall is the brainchild of sibling programmers and musicians Hays and Ryan Holladay, and they intend to build a series of site specific albums for other locations, the next one being Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, site of the 1939 World’s Fair.
There’s been some discussion over at Create Digital Music (CDM’s Peter Kirn is interviewed in the Washington Post article about Bluebrain) about a couple of things: one was whether this is the first locative musical work as claimed on Bluebrain’s blog, because Kirn and other commenters on CDM link up to other app based sound works created for specific places, such as the Urban Remix Project in Times Square (which to me, didn’t really yield anything too interesting to listen to).
A similar app mentioned in the CDM comments is the Inception App, based on the movie directed by Christopher Nolan and developed in collaboration with RjDj, the company that makes augmented or reactive music apps, combining live acoustic information from our activities and environments with music making technology. (I myself enjoy some of RjDj’s apps, having used them to transform the chatter and door slams of city bus rides into chorused, beat-driven soundscapes.)
The Inception app promises to deliver, through the headset and mic of your iPhone or iPod and your device’s GPS locator, an aural dreamworld combining the sounds of your location with new music by Inception film composer Hans Zimmer. Like the film, the app contains levels of “dreams”, and you can unlock various levels by doing a variety of things. “For example, new dreams are unlocked by walking, being in a quiet room, traveling faster than 30 mph, when the sun shines or it is full moon.” But one of the dreams will only play if you’re in Africa, which takes us back to the DC-only Bluebrain album.
What is this album if you can only get it in one place? Well, that’s familiar. Haven’t we all searched the stacks of local record shops in cities other than our own, looking for musical gems unique to that particular town? But, you can’t take the Bluebrain album home – and even if you listen to it in DC, it will be different every time you hear it. In that sense, isn’t it more of a site specific live performance, except you are the only performer, deciding by your movements, exactly how this thing will be performed?
Another issue seems to be whether to call Bluebrain’s The National Mall an actual “album”- that being a collection of fixed songs that are usually arranged in a specific order. Not being in DC, there’s no opportunity right now to actually play the project on my device, but if you are there DC to listen to it…are these actual “songs” that change as you move from zone to zone…or snatches of musical elements? If the latter, maybe, as others have pointed out, it’s more appropriate to call this a location aware “composition”? But again, that irritates my usual notion of composition where the artist presents me with layers of notes and sounds in a particular musical order so they have meaning as a whole. Should we just call it “a piece”? (Let’s.)
Because the piece focuses on a particular attraction in a particular city, it could seem like a PR project to attract visitors, just like the Movement app I downloaded for the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Does it make you want to hop on the Acela and check it out? Also, because the The National Mall is delivering location based content/media in much the same way as Yelp or Google can tell me where the closest cupcake shop is or if there was a battle fought 100 years ago on the exact spot where I’m standing, the Bluebrain piece could seem more like a coding assignment and less like art. I mean, beyond describing the experience of receiving all these musical sounds in such a high tech way, I can’t see that folks have said much so far about the actual music being any good. I haven’t seen any album reviews in the music press yet.
I am so used to my attachment to conventional albums, the personal timestamps we place on our favorite records, the way our feelings about them change with time while the musical recordings themselves remain fixed. I’m also very attached to live musical performances, listening to those songs I know well infused with new energy each time the performer/composer steps up on stage. I wonder if experiencing a new technical gimmick can compare with that. But looking at all the press surrounding Bluebrain, I guess that is the point of The National Mall – to shake up ideas about what an album or performance or audience participation is in today’s wired world. We’ll see soon how “app albums” will develop in the hands of more and more artists quite soon. Word came in March that Bjork is working on a project called Biophilia, her 7th studio album partially recorded on a iPad which will be distributed as a series of apps. But I think she’s going to want this to be available in more than one place, and I still think I’ll want to buy a ticket to a show.
So, since the holiday season, have you been flailing around in your living room, throwing imaginary footballs, jumping over invisible obstacles or throwing punches in the air? If you have, you probably got Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox under your tree, the gesture based gaming system that requires no controller to play.
The Kinect’s sensor uses a camera, a depth sensor and a microphone array to track your movements, scan your environment and listen to spoken commands. The special software employs face and voice recognition and 3D motion capture, transforming you into an onscreen avatar that can fully interact with the characters and action of the game.
While the Kinect was still in development under the name Project Natal, I knew it wouldn’t take too long for programmers and/or artists to figure out a way to make use of its open USB port and create other kinds of drivers that would read input from the sensors. Microsoft says it basically welcomes the experiments that started cropping up so quickly after the system’s release last fall. Beyond gaming and other media industries, the possibilities for Kinect’s use in the creative process and in multimedia performance seem pretty clear. Let’s take a look at what some of the Kinect hackers are up to besides virtual bowling:
Last month at a meetup of the Boston Ableton users group, the crowd got a demo of Kinect being used to send midi information to Ableton Live. Here, the user waves his arm up and down to control a “wobble” effect in the music:
Hirofumi Kaneko made this line drawing program using OpenFrameworks and the Kinect, creating a pencil sketched avatar of himself that moves as he does:
Ryan Monk developed some painting software for use with the Kinect. Here you can watch him moving his “brush” in the air as the artwork takes shape onscreen:
Here’s the next step in VJing with Kinect, controlling images or graphics by dancing along with the music. This example uses an open application called TUIO, which was originally created for interactive or multi-touch surfaces. It can now track specific hand gestures, and helps the Kinect “speak” with the visual software, OpenSoundControl:
Here is some digital puppetry created with the Kinect connected to a MacBook and real-time animation software called Animata. It’s part of the Virtual Marionette research project from grifu.com. :
Looking at all these Kinect hacks sprouting up all over the place, it seems that creating or editing digital media won’t just mean butt spread and carpal tunnel syndrome. We’ll rise up from our workstations and learn to control the arts with the rest of our bodies in some new, though sometimes silly looking, ways.
“Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (January 25, 1927 in Rio de Janeiro – December 8, 1994 in New York), also known as Tom Jobim, was a Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. A primary force behind the creation of the bossa nova style, his songs have been performed by many singers and instrumentalists within Brazil and internationally.”
Tom Jobim: b. 1927 Rio de Janeiro – d. 1994 New York
So goes the WIKI. Happy Birthday, Tom.
I can’t say that I’ve ever been a Bossa Nova fan per se but the more I hear it the deeper my respect grows. Not surprisingly, it grew by leaps and bounds in recent years while working in Brazil. Something about actually being there and taking in that vibe. I’m sure that’s a quite common effect when we travel to a place where any art originates.
This year, to celebrate Jobim’s anniversary on January 25, the radio station WKCR 89.9 FM in New York City is having an all-day on-air festival of his life and music. As part of that series of events, NYC-based composer Arthur Kampela, himself a native of São Paulo, Brazil, put together a group of composers to create recorded arrangements of Jobim’s music. That airs at 8 PM (01:00 GMT) and is able to be heard via streaming on the internet through the station’s web site.
Amongst the composers that Arthur put together to create arrangements were: himself, Clarice Assad, Gene Pritsker, Dan Cooper, myself, and most likely a few more that I won’t know about until I hear the broadcast. When the email went out, Arthur had a list of the composers and included suggestions of pieces we might want to work with. Like I said, not being the biggest Bossa Nova fan, and, the more famous pieces already having been doled out (The Girl from Impanema et al), I had to YouTube the suggestions I was given. I listened to them. Hmm…I wasn’t particularly inspired, despite the fine pieces that they are. Scrolling through a list of Jobim compositions, One Note Samba (Samba De Uma Nota So) caught my eye. With nothing more than the title (one note? I can handle that!) I listened to the original once (OK, I had heard it before I realized) and set to work.
Having no interest in trying to beat the Brazilians at their own game, I had to choose an approach that would be respectful yet unique enough to be worth the effort. I started thinking: how many things do we hear every day that push one note “melodies” at us? I made a short list to get started and then began collecting samples, tuning them all to the same pitch and beat mapping them into the same tempo.
The result was a new piece I call One Note Sampla for Tom Jobim. You can listen to the original here.
Busy Signals in D#m7
“One Note Sampla for Tom Jobim” by Patrick Grant
If you tune in and want to follow along, here’s a list of sounds that one can hear when listening to the piece:
1. A chorus of touch tone phones, from dial tone to keypad to busy signals. The busy signals build up into the first chord of the song (D#m7) in patterns of 2s, 3s, and 4s. A chromatic electric guitar duet is accompanied by strings and timpani as a drum loop of junkyard metal establishes the down beat.
2. A garbage truck alarm sounds as it backs up, left to right, with strings playing the harmonies of a slowed down chorus.
3. Submarine SONAR pings with added dripping water FX. Dripping water in a submarine? Not good.
4. Cells phones ringing and the door chimes of a NYC subway car. Going somewhere.
5. Bells and anvils clang during a double-time jazz version of the chorus.
6. More cell phones ringing with different model car horns playing the one note melody in the distance. Brazilian traffic jam?
7. A heart monitor and respirator. After a gasp, the monitor goes flatline. An international vehicle siren is heard following the descending chromatic harmony of the piece, mimicking a Doppler effect.
8. A rock band kicks in. Under the jangly guitars, an orchestral cresendo from Alban Berg’s expressionist opera Wozzeck is heard. This comes from the end of Act Two Scene Two of the opera, Variations on a Single Note. At the end you can hear the timpani play the dominant rhythmic motive from Berg’s piece:
The dominant rhythmic motive from Wozzeck
9. One last chorus. The guitars are now in canon, one beat behind the other.
10. Two guitars battle out the last instance of the one-note melody. The orchestra swells on that one note again until…
The MMiXdown 