John Reef @ Meeting IV (feb 22,07)

My contribution to the evening's depravity was the third movement -- Adagio -- of
Béla Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta . This is some of the "spookiest"
music I know -- an ominous soundscape of unusual timbral effects and uncommon
modality. (This movement plays during part of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and
Bartók himself looks as if he might not be out of place in a horror movie...
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Strasse/2943/Composers/bartok.gif )

So I decided to bring this piece sort of spur of the moment...I had spent the past
week mired in pictorial representations of the Golden Ratio in music, for a seminar
I am taking on Visualizing Music. Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is one
of the pieces most analyzed in terms of this ratio, and during class that day we looked
at several visual examples -- without actually listening to the music, which I
immediately craved to hear. Fortuitously, I had it on my old Norton Anthology
of Western Music CDs, lying around from undergraduate days.

Perhaps my idea to listen in darkness was a bit silly, but it didn't seem to go
over too badly........