Zoe Martlew is a cellist who specialises in contemporary music.
But even she was thwarted by Juliana Hodkinson’s noise piece Scrape for cello with metal plate, playback track and sound diffusion, performed at Dark Music Days festival in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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Who would want to listen to this piece twice? Or (in my case) even once?
Not exactly classical music – more like a freak show for the gullible. But there are government grants for this kind of dreck.
Not exactly music.
There are extensive systems of support to keep the genre alive in spite of its lack of viability. It’s zombie-music.
What’s a good looking girl like her messing about with all this dreck for ? All a bit undignified
Wait until the Thought Police come out and get you for your “good looking girl” comment. Quick; hide!!
Anyway, to answer your (rhetorical?) question; somebody had to make that ‘noise’ palatable.
The cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, an American lady and particularly pretty, made a career out of playing sound art on her cello. But it was a show rather than a performance, including electronic fusion, humming, playing with two bows at the same time (I’m not making this up), all to the fascination of small audiences captivated by the spectacle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JPmy4vyc04
https://currentsnewmedia.org/artist/francis-marie-uitti/
She’s lucky it didn’t make her eardrums explode. This has been known to happen.
It made the audience’s heads explode as well, most likely.
She’d be better off joining an orchestra and playing some music.
Those who can’t, play “new music.”
That is true, and people get very angry when you say that. Because it is true. I know of ‘new music experts’ playing sound art but occasionally stepping-down from their progressive high horse and play some music, for a change, and although they can play the notes (they do practice), it does not sound at all right because they don’t have the feeling for how music works. They play the sound it makes.
The bow gave its life for us. We should be grateful.
I am sick of so-called “composers” who have no regard for performers or their expensive instruments. Real music does not do damage. If you can’t write real music, shut up. And stop gobbling up the money that should go to real composers.
I wouldn’t even call that noise “music.” If it is, then the word “music” no longer really means anything. One may as well call bulldozer or jackhammer noises “music.”
The Unsinkable Zoe Martlew! National treasure.
Do you recall any moment when ‘regular people’ call classical music a bourgeois or an elite boring/overrated art?
Well, in the comments above you’re being as ignorant as them.
That’s why music is so underrated and undervalued, we’re the first ones to defame other practices in order to point out that our “taste” is better.
Way to go guys…
This isn’t music. This is talentless shit. Learn the difference.
The difference between sound and music is not a matter of taste. It is wholeheartedly recommended to read a bit about that.
Begin with Roger Scruton’s ‘Aesthetics of Music’.
It is clear that the “composer” didn’t have to much idea about Cello. I cannot understand her! She didn’t rehearsal? What was the conclusion about the result of the use of this “metal blade” after the first try?
“Noise piece” sounds more realistic than “sonic art” – which is a euphemism anyway. Avoid, unless you’ve had the vaccination.
That’s a cute joke, but it’s just a bow or luthier failure, not a contemporary music fail. The video isn’t high resolution, but she’s evidently playing hair on strings normally, and the small wood plug that holds the hair in place at the tip of the bow suddenly pops out; she tells her audience she just had the bow re-haired. It could have happened during Beethoven’s Eroica.
More from the “I Suffered for My Art, Now it’s Your Turn” school of composition. Ms. Hodkinson might benefit from advice Vaughan Williams gave to a young aspiring composer: If a tune occurs to you, don’t hesitate to right it down.
[[ If a tune occurs to you, don’t hesitate to right it down.]]
And that’s what RVW said, is it, Greg?
Wow, how did that happen? Can I blame it on auto check?
I doubt that it was the piece that made her bow break (it didn’t, by the way, explode in any meaningful sense of that word). It looks as though the break was at the tip (something that has happened to me a couple of times). Nothing she was doing (and she was only a minute into the piece) looked to be putting inordinate stress on the bow. If that was a new bow, I’d be having a word with the maker.
My wife once was playing piano in a new work where she was supposed to play a chord and then scrabble around the inside of the piano with a piece of plastic while the chord continued to sound. Except that wasn’t physically possible for anyone with normal length arm….
And that was the first and only time this humble page turner got to play the piano at the RFH….