Sunday, May 11, 2014

How I Got Into Instrumental Music (Part Three)

I have more previews of new stock music coming this week. In the meantime, here's a little more biographical information about my lifelong fascination with instrumental music.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were an era of explosive creativity in the performing arts, and instrumental pop music was no exception. I didn't know it at the time, but art and experimental music were having a huge impact on pop, rock, and jazz artists. One of these art music genres was musique concrete, a compositional technique that used recorded live elements as material. The first example I ever heard was "Revolution Number 9," a track from "The Beatles" (aka the White Album), produced by the incomparable George (later Sir George) Martin.
In previewing the track just now on YouTube, I heard for the first time the extent to which Sir George used panning (the moving of sound between the listener's left and right ears). I was about eight years old the first time I heard this, and it freaked me out. However, when I studied this style in college years later, I understood the impact it had on the Beatles and others. The use of sounds as music eventually led to sampling, at first in crude instruments like the mellotron, and later in digital samplers. These kinds of tools are now indispensable for aspiring composers like me.

An even bigger impact on popular music came from the advent of the synthesizer. Pop groups were experimenting with these electronic instruments in the late 1960s. The Beatles used synthesizers to create the famous "chord that lasts forever" at the end of Sgt. Pepper. But the first artist to really show the potential of the instrument was Walter (later Wendy) Carlos with the album Switched on Bach. Check out the following video for a sample of the original in all its vinyl glory.
I never owned a copy of this record, but I heard a lot of it and a lot about it in the early 70s. It inspired a host of other musicians, especially prog rock icons like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman, who created this arrangement of a movement from a Brahms symphony entirely with electronic instruments.
Finally, a Dutch group called Focus made a big impression on me with an instrumental one-hit wonder called "Hocus Pocus." It made a big impression on a lot of other folks, too, given the number of covers I found. However, no one did it better than the originals, especially guitarist Jan Akkerman (who I suspect was thrashing before the word was coined) and the amazing Thijs Van Leer. Van Leer played organ, electric piano, and flute. He used his voice, with its four-or-so octave range, as another instrument. And he yodeled. And scatted. And whistled. And acted crazy. And yodeled some more. I don't need to say "accept no substitutes" because where Thijs is concerned, there simply aren't any.

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