I want you to listen to this music, and hopefully you are listening to it for the first time. I've always been a secret lover of classical music since I first started to learn how to play the piano. I could get swept away by an orchestra, I see such wonderful colours and lights when I close my eyes, and whole lifetimes come to pass and stories unfurl when a symphony rings sweetly or hotly through my ears. If a piece of music really touches me, I get shivers up and down my body. That is how I can tell a piece of music is good, the lights, the sounds, the ideas besides, it is the shivers or pure bliss I get which start right across my shoulders, through my heart, and spread like a wave of pure, shocking joy. I am floored by them, I need a moment to recover after feeling them.
One of the first classical themes I fell in love with is called Le Danse Macabre which is a wonderful example of 1800's classical composition. It was composed by Camille Saint-Saëns after being inspired by a poem written based on an old french superstition that on halloween every year, on the stroke of midnight, the devil rises from the deep to play his fiddle, and make all the dead dance until dawn...
Oh I remember when I was a teenager and first head that music in full glory, I had it on repeat and on my CD player (that was a while ago, remember portable CD players? I'll be harking on about walkmans next.) Recently, I've been diving into 'new age classical' which are compositions made in the last fifty years or so, which are so unique! Given the new techniques used in producing music combined with the classical format of the orchestra, it is so compelling!
Usually, in these modern times when people say something is 'new age' it usually means that they have tried to improve it by doing away with all the nonsense which gave it its charm, and crowbarred modern thinking to something which didn't need 'improvement.' However, I find that new age classical is just an amalgamation of different techniques and instruments appended to the old orchestral format. What we are left with is the sort of wonderful music used in the soundtracks of movies. You remember I mentioned before about when I hear inspiring and breathtaking music, I can see wonderful images and light? Well modern classical is applied to movies in the same way, so that people can feel through sound what they are feeling through sight.
I challenge you to listen to this next piece by Thomas Newman (a new favourite of mine.) Close your eyes, sit, be, just experience it. Feel the shivers run through your body and wait for that moment where you need to breath in out of shear breathlessness. Seek this pleasure, for this is the true measure of great music.
Usually, in these modern times when people say something is 'new age' it usually means that they have tried to improve it by doing away with all the nonsense which gave it its charm, and crowbarred modern thinking to something which didn't need 'improvement.' However, I find that new age classical is just an amalgamation of different techniques and instruments appended to the old orchestral format. What we are left with is the sort of wonderful music used in the soundtracks of movies. You remember I mentioned before about when I hear inspiring and breathtaking music, I can see wonderful images and light? Well modern classical is applied to movies in the same way, so that people can feel through sound what they are feeling through sight.
I challenge you to listen to this next piece by Thomas Newman (a new favourite of mine.) Close your eyes, sit, be, just experience it. Feel the shivers run through your body and wait for that moment where you need to breath in out of shear breathlessness. Seek this pleasure, for this is the true measure of great music.
Now try and tell me the 'Sex Pistols' were good music.
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