Edgard Varèse, “Ionisationâ€, performed by Chailly and the ASKO Ensemble.
This is a piece for percussion ensemble.
It has a siren in it, and I like any piece with a good siren in it, whether it’s George Antheil’s Ballet Mècanique or Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61â€. It starts out quite foreboding, quiets down, and then has loud bits interspersed with quiet bits (although not many of those). If the piece has some kind of structure, then I can’t discern it. I like it just for its sound and maybe that’s all that Varèse intended.
One weekend last fall I was visiting my nieces and nephew and we were recording some stuff for fun on an 8-track portable studio I had just bought. On one piece, which I called “The Crazy Song†(and it was just that), my 4-year old nephew wanted to overdub his toy drum machine on every single track. Of course, I didn’t let him do that, because we wanted to use most of the tracks for other weird, mostly vocal things that my nieces (6- and 8-years old) were thinking up. Anyway, I think maybe my nephew was feeling a close artistic kinship with Varèse last weekend, which I, with my more conservative views on music, thwarted. I felt kind of bad about that when I thought about it later and the next time I visit I’m going to let him do his own recording with 8 tracks of only drums.