Contemporary Style

Olivier Messiaen - Quaturo pour la fin du temps (1941) Click here to listen! Quatuor pour la fin du temps Inspiration This work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation and it is quoted in Messiaen's Preface in the score. "And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire ... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth .... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever ... that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ..." (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7, King James Version) Messiaen's notes on the first movement " Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale

Short post! Just here to share a couple things. Basically the idea behind these pieces is that you record yourself speaking a short quote or paragraph or something. You then play the recording back into a room over speakers and record the playback. Looping this many times causes the recordings to loose quality, but gain emphasis in certain frequencies that the room emphasizes more. In addition to this, I added a visual element. On the theme of recreation and creating or rebuilding something I chose a picture from the current wildfire raging in California and removed all of the orange-yellow fire color from it. The text is that color, and throughout the piece it dissolves into the image, revealing what the original image was. Enjoy :) My piece: A whole new thing The first piece in this style: I am sitting in a room

Ben Johnston - String Quartet No.  7 (1984) Scurrying, Forceful, Intense Click here to listen! String Quartet No. 7 Nerd Stuff String Quartet No. 7 is one of the most difficult pieces of all time. The piece is based on the idea of microtonality. Normally music is divided up into 12 different pitch classes (a pitch class accounts for every octave of a given note). Playing twelve notes from the note C on a piano will get you back to another C an octave higher. However, pitch exists between these predefined notes. Ben Johnston, as seen in the image above, calculated many microtones; distinct pitches between what we classify as the 12 "normal" pitch classes. Johnston calculated over one thousand individual microtones to use for his String Quartet No. 7.  Why is it so hard Musicians become extremely good at playing the 12 pitch classes that they normally have to play, but playing microtones is something completely alien. Many instruments, for example piano, cannot pro