The Worst Thing I’ve Seen

Aphids
Thursday–Sept 15
posted by Gavin Shettler
This was awful. I was terribly bored. I aliments left. I get the music. I am a classically trained cellist. The music is atonal, arrhythmic, the musicians have quite a bit of input into the sounds they make. The composition uses traditional notation along with graphics and images for the musicians to respond to. The work is a reflection of statistical data collected by the CIA in blatantly useless attempt to organize the world’s population by skin color. Sounds like it could be neat. A video piece plays above the musicians heads, showing this statical data in a truly uninspiring, visually bland way. The composition is designed to sound like statistics would sound like…lots of screeches and slides. So for 45 minutes there is this audio assault going on. OK. This type of music has its roots in the late great John Cage. In the 70s and 80s whole symphonies were made. It was like a badge of honor to be able to withstand this type of non harmonic berage. You watched people leave in the middle of the performance, but you, no you stuck it out. I’ve played this type of music, which is great fun to create, terrible to listen to. It did have real relevance 15 to 20 years ago. I was shock to hear something so ‘done’ so over explored, in 2005. At one point the string quartet played on quarter sized instruments. I found this gimmicky and pointless. The only cool thing was that the music was read from ibooks, that scrolled the music before them.