Music Mosaic

Music Mosaic












Fly, written and performed by Ludovico Einaudi, was released in 2006. It is a contemporary piece with primary instrumentalizations of piano and subtle strings, ending with eerie electronic effects. The song begins in an E major and through added sharps, naturals, and deep ringing chords, it takes a rather dark turn at the end. Transitioning from feelings of hope and peace into struggle and burden (but still with strains of Divinity) and culminating in foreboding and mystery; the piece evokes a sense of journey, much like the journey one takes in life. It involves a daily fight for peace and progress. There are precipices to summit, trials to confront, work to be accomplished. There is heavenly support in all this, but there is also adversarial influence.

As I reflected upon this piece, I saw the story it told repeated around me countless times. Stories of struggle, growth, and even death. I was particularly drawn to the correlation I saw with nature. A plant struggles to break the hard ground to let its tender leaves feel the sun. It must fight countless obstacles to grow. It is no easy or simple process, but the journey is fulfilling and beautiful. However, all things have their cycle. The plants must one day return to the dust they sprang from. With the onset of autumn, they wither and expire. Soon nothing is left but the twisted arms of branches or stalks. There seems to be complete death. However, as the song invokes, there is an uncertainty or mystery to this end. When the snows come it hides all. But as the seasons always tell, life will return again, and even though it seems a cold, dark close, it is only momentary. 

The images I created show this cycle of life. From shoots and buds to full blooms and then to withering and bareness. Not only in content is this represented, but in color and texture as well. The first images in the series are bright and saturated. They are tinted with white to illustrate the sense of hope one has at the beginning of a journey. As they series progresses however, the saturation continually decreases, and the tinted wash continually greys. The last image is distinct however. There is no tinted wash and no manipulation of saturation. It depicts the snow-covered trees through a window, but it has warm undertones. This is a purposeful juxtaposition with the ending of Einaudi’s song, Fly. Though his piece ends with disconcerting dissonance, this last image gives a sense of faint hope in spite of the deadness.

Fly
https://open.spotify.com/track/3yuCAw61jqfyv2KzMoVdXA?si=Ay8xS1YeT92fMWXKuufnzw

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Online Response 5 - Return to Homs and Slingshot Hip Hop

Image
Return to Homs  is a poignant and personal depiction of the Syrian conflict and civil war. Its main character is the renowned goalkeeper for the national soccer team, Abdul Basset Saroot. The film follows him from the beginning of the peaceful protests as he performs rallying songs to the breakout of civil war and his audacious leadership of a small band of rebels. He is charismatic and relatable, giving emotional and intimate insight into the war-torn area. Slingshot Hip Hop  is another stirring documentary that gives the viewers an insight into a political conflict, especially from a perspective uncommonly envisioned. The story deals with the birth of rap in Israeli occupied Palestinian communities. Two main groups, DAM and PR, give us a personal view of the precarious situation of Palestinians in sector ’48, Gaza, and the West Bank. The two groups (and others) use rap as a peaceful form of vocalizing their struggles and discontent, as well as rallying and infor...
Read more

Online Response 3 - Exposing vs. Observing

The expository mode of documentary "assembles fragments of the historical world into a more rhetorical or narrative frame than an aesthetic or poetic one," (Nichols). It employs indexical images, poetic and affective associations, storytelling qualities, and rhetorical persuasiveness. These types of documentaries rely heavily on spoken dialogue to inform the audience. Editing focuses on the gathering of evidence or creating the greatest impact, therefore often spatial or temporal continuity is altered. On the other hand, observational mode seeks to have as limited involvement in the events as possible. The idea is that the filmmaker sets up the camera and lets fate tell the story. Both modes were enabled by advances in camera and sound technologies in the 1960’s. Equipment became lighter, less obtrusive and easier to transport. It allowed more freedom of movement therefore leading to less strict control over staging, arrangement, or composition, and in the expository documen...
Read more

Online Response 4 - Participatory and Reflexive Documentary

Image
Enabled by the technological advancements of the 1960s, the participatory mode of documentary formed. It is nearly opposite of the observational documentary with the filmmaker directly interacting with the subject, conversing, collaborating, and sometimes confronting. The audience also is able to interact more with the subject. These films draw from an anthropological tradition but differ in their dedication to the rhetoric of a story rather than simply the social science research. Documentary tends to not sacrifice the narrative for the data. Often in participatory mode however, the narrative doesn’t occur until the filmmaker incites the story; potentially one they are already involved with, or perhaps one that they seek out to investigate.  The participatory mode can be exemplified by Ross McElwee’s documentary,  Time Indefinite  and Jean Rouch’s  Chronicle of a Summer . The story in both films would not have occurred if the filmmakers had not picked up their ...
Read more