My brain hurts...

[Jeunemaitre]

I rather like it actually. Music is one of those things that has subjective standards applied to it. Like fine art, some community of academics feels themselves qualified to judge the absolute quality and impact of a piece, but in the end, the social impact is determined by how much some rich nut is willing to pay to own it; or in the case of "popular" music, how many 12 yr olds call MTV to request it.

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, music is in the ear of the listener.  This just goes to show that humans will attempt, successful or not, to make music with whatever tools they have at hand, be it two sticks to beat together, a fine violin or the latest synthesizer.  I do think it a clever use of resources.

That reminds me: As my final project for a music theory class in college (had to compose three pieces, each in a different style from a list provided by the instructor) I slapped together the "Trash Day Suite." Inspired by the early morning trash removal from my off campus residence, it had three movements: 2) "Da Bums and Da Bottles" - a creative percussion piece with 6 primary sounds - glass on glass, glass on aluminum, aluminum on aluminum, glass breaking, aluminum dropping, and "rattle the bin." 2) "5 More Minutes" - a non metric vocal piece that starts dreamy and tries to stay that way but is occasionally pierced by the sopranos imitating the "beep beep beep" of a backing up truck. 3) "Fine, I'm Up" - I was going for something that would blend from the dreamy quality of the previous movement into a more regimented and clear simple melody to mirror the process of gaining coherence as one prepares for the day. Unfortunately, the closest I could get was something more like a poorly conceived canon that couldn't get itself together. Maybe some day I'll get off my ass and record it. Someday I suppose...

Not sure why I though anyone would want to hear about that, but sometimes it's just nice to remember things you had fun doing...