Let us test our quiz on Phish, 7/2/98, Set II, The Grey Hall, Freetown Christiana:
Ghost: yes
Runaway Jim: yes
Prince Caspian: yes
You Enjoy Myself: yes
July 30, 2008
Is it program music?
This is a yes-or-no question for songs (we are interested in whether the music is programmatic with respect to the song’s title (the title is a short poem (is the poem about the spirit of the music?
Let us test our quiz on Phish, 7/2/98, Set II, The Grey Hall, Freetown Christiana:
Let us test our quiz on Phish, 7/2/98, Set II, The Grey Hall, Freetown Christiana:
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2 comments:
yes
Take Guyute. "Guyute was the evil pig/who walked on me and danced a jig"--the music sort of dances a jig, too, something Irish or from Fizziwig's ball in The Christmas Carol. That's one way of being programmatic, and if you focus on the cartoon of it and let the narrative program how you hear the music, there's no way you will enjoy it; the music has to be sui generis, that's how I hear it: there are no earth names for where it goes. Then there's the whole middle section of the song that gets all heavy and gnarled, the maelstrom that whirls you in and beats you up like Guyute does to the narrator in the lyrics. For me, the illustrative level, which usually doesn't even occur to me and seems like an optional way of looking at the music, more of a personal problem, gives way to a second way of being imitative, like imitating a spirit and invoking it and being taken oven by it. It's not that the music describes the story or imitates the properties of its players, it's more like the lyrics are referring to the music, for the real Guyute is a being in music. Guyute is the monster you meet there. The first five or so times I heard Guyute I skipped to the next song after about 15 seconds, disgusted by the tuneless (I thought) mid 90s-ism of it and the annoying humor, but when I listened to it all the way through (it was the one from 12/7/97), I really got torn apart by the crazy section, scared and bewildered, I had been completely unprepared. Then when the narrator comes back in he was like a fellow traveler, not a storyteller. He was describing what I experienced: I encountered a monster; I did not like it; it changed me, and I am grateful: it is this being that is referred to when they sing: "he sucks from me my only breath/that I had breathed since I was 10/I hope this happens once again."
But, yes
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