The Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late and the melody is a bar early
December 20, 2018 1:22 PM   Subscribe

 
ominous!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:30 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


That is the most lifeless Moonlight Sonata I have ever heard.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:34 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


An amazing conductor/pianist told me that the original instructions in the score were to hold peddle down the entire piece. But no performer ever had the nerve.
posted by sammyo at 1:38 PM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


On my laptop at home, I have a playlist of cover songs that are just ... off.

This is ... *chef's kiss*
posted by gauche at 1:39 PM on December 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


Is this Mefi's Own??? I saw it on twitter and immediately shared it with my childhood piano teacher, who taught me a lot about experimental music because it was more fun than trying to get me to practice more. (He liked it.)
posted by Tesseractive at 1:49 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Very cool. It's like when a movie score wants you to recognize the piece it's copying but also notice that it's been altered to totally change the mood.
posted by dnash at 1:55 PM on December 20, 2018


This is like if a mirror-world Brian Eno decided music must lead to unease and unease must make music.
posted by Caxton1476 at 2:05 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is plain silly. It screws up the harmonies and just makes no damn sense at all.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 2:12 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


that just totally broke my head and i need to lie down
posted by Dr. Twist at 2:13 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


this is uncomfortable and painful in a way that delights me on some deep level
please don't make it stop
posted by NMcCoy at 2:24 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Wait, isn't that just the bass being two bars late? I'm confused...
posted by Charity Garfein at 2:35 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Nah, it's that the bass is a bar behind of the central continuo (? it's been awhile) arpeggiation movement, and the top-line melody is a bar ahead of same. So three parallel tracks of movement.
posted by cortex at 2:44 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


the original instructions in the score were to hold peddle down the entire piece.

A piano teacher once told me that when it says to hold the pedal down forever, it's usually because the pedals they had back in the olden days didn't sustain the sound nearly as long as they do on a modern piano. In this case, I guess it could also be something to do with good old Beethoven starting to go deaf around the time he wrote it. I wonder if he could've imagined what this would sound like, given a year or three to get used to some of the new developments in atonality and such that we've had since then.
posted by sfenders at 2:49 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I love this. Thank you, bondcliff.
posted by straight at 2:51 PM on December 20, 2018


I keep mentally stumbling. Wow. And ow. Amazing and painful. Amazingly painful.

I've been reduced to wurbling quietly in the corner haven't I ...
posted by Quasirandom at 2:55 PM on December 20, 2018


SATAN OSCILLATE MY METALLIC SONATAS
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:55 PM on December 20, 2018 [12 favorites]


(Earthworm) Jim is now a blind cave salamander, and this would've been better music to accompany the event
posted by JoeXIII007 at 3:11 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


There are some quite beautiful suspensions and harmonies in here along with all the dissonance!
posted by capricorn at 3:20 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Just as Beethoven intended!

I can't wait for the period instrument version.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 3:37 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I clicked away so fast, I don’t know why, and my ears hurt

Is this normal
posted by schadenfrau at 3:39 PM on December 20, 2018


An amazing conductor/pianist told me that the original instructions in the score were to hold peddle down the entire piece. But no performer ever had the nerve

think i recall andras schiff explains this (and also recommends it be played significantly faster than the received tradition): hear here circa 6 min, from part 4 of his series of lectures on all beethoven's piano sonatas, collected here by the guardian.
posted by 20 year lurk at 3:57 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]


thanks i hate it
posted by boo_radley at 4:21 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Within the next two years, this will be condemned by some fundamentalist, somewhere, as the music of Satan.

Congratulations.
posted by clawsoon at 4:43 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is like if a mirror-world Brian Eno decided music must lead to unease and unease must make music.

This reminds me a bit of the B side of Eno's discrete music.

From the liner notes:
Another way of satisfying the interest in self-regulating and self-generating systems is exemplified in the 3 variations on the Pachebel Canon. These take their titles from the charmingly inaccurate translation of the French cover notes for the "Erato" recording of the piece made by the orchestra of Jean Francois Paillard. That particular recording inspired these pieces by its unashamedly romantic rendition of a very systematic Renaissance canon.

In this case the "system" is a group of performers with a set of instructions - and the "input" is the fragment of Pachebel. Each variation takes a small section of the score (two or four bars) as its starting point, and permutates the players' parts such that they overlay each other in ways not suggested by the original score. In "Fullness of Wind" each player's tempo is decreased, the rate of decrease governed by the pitch of his instrument (bass=slow). "French Catalogues" groups together sets of notes and melodies with time directions gathered from other parts of the score. In "Brutal Ardour" each player has a sequence of notes related to those of the other players, but the sequences are of different lengths so that the original relationships quickly break down.

posted by Television Name at 5:19 PM on December 20, 2018 [8 favorites]


The main result of this post for me was to remind me that Moonlight Sonata is a fucking gorgeous piece of music and I should go listen to it. The real version I mean, not this horrorshow.

Great success.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:43 PM on December 20, 2018


Oh shit, Television Name, I hadn't heard this and I am into it.
posted by cortex at 5:49 PM on December 20, 2018


I can see Thom Yorke crooning over it
posted by windbox at 7:13 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


This was possibly the most beautiful piece of music I have heard in years. The continuous edge of recognition thwarted by the flowing through of dissonant harmonies made me listen. It was a new piece in many senses of the word, old yet very modern, familiar but not. Thanks for posting this. It made my day.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:37 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


Some really nice chords. Now do the third movement.
posted by hawthorne at 7:43 PM on December 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


In music theory they call this polytonal music because you have different harmonies (keys? IDK the right term) clashing together creating that peculiar soundspace, really cool that somebody thought create it this way.
It's interesting you can obtain a modernist / avant-garde feel just by doing a really simple thing to an existing piece, just by time-shifting different lines/voices.
posted by polymodus at 10:34 PM on December 20, 2018


Not really knowing the original piece, this honestly sounded pretty unremarkable to me? Like, it's kind of amusing and strange to me that people could have such an intense negative reaction to it. But in a nonjudgmental way!
posted by Panthalassa at 12:25 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


This was cool and tough to listen to.... now imagine actually practising and learning this well enough to play it for the recording shudders.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:58 AM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


no this is not good i can't deal with this
posted by lollusc at 3:12 AM on December 21, 2018


Wait, I'm not supposed to love this? I thought it was wonderful, both as its own thing and in juxtaposition with all the existing cultural baggage of The Moonlight Sonata. I don't know this world well, but it reminded me of Richter's Vivaldi, especially Spring 1, which takes what is 90% the thing itself and turns it into something strange and lovely (which I was just reminded of by its brief but pivotal role in My Brilliant Friend on HBO). But anyway, what do I know -- I still often return to Young's Well-Tuned Piano (thanks Metafilter), so my ears clearly have odd tastes.
posted by chortly at 8:57 PM on December 21, 2018


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