Tag: music psychology
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Victor Ward’s Mondo Exotica
Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama it-boy Victor instructs his staff on his club’s opening night music. As he points out, it essentially amounts to putting on an Ultra-Lounge CD. (The first of which, Mondo Exotica, was released in 1996, a couple of years before the book was published.) An interesting comment on the ease of adopting…
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Monet and Clams Casino
After a visit to the Saatchi gallery last weekend put me in drawing-art-and-music-parallels mode, I got thinking about the fact that much of what’s popular and “cool” in today’s UK/US music scene is unabashedly impressionistic. Form and theme are present but blurred, lyrics often part-way indecipherable, samples topped, tailed and laden with effects. Our music…
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Draw what you hear
This year, a friend and I organised a charity concert for Save the Children. We asked primary schoolers to listen to some of the music that would be in the programme and draw how the music made them feel. Here are some of the results for Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla, below. Drawings by the talented pupils of Ysgol…
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The Words That Maketh Murder
This post is purely in admiration of PJ Harvey’s move from verse to chorus in The Words That Maketh Murder. (If you’re short on time skip to 1’25″.) She first sings the title line whilst still within the confines of the verse, then pulls the rug out from under your feet by surreptitiously shifting down a…
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Scoring the period drama
It recently occurred to me: isn’t it strange how the majority of TV period dramas are scored with a soundtrack appropriate for – or at least alluding to – the music of the era? It’s a little like saying that UK films set in the ’90s should always be accompanied by Brit-pop. A standard example of what you’d…
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Keep regulars happy or get more regulars?
A while back, I read an interesting post by Mark Hadfield about Ultra-safe vs Mainstream vs Risky brands in which he makes a comparison with his ‘mainstream’ dedication to running. It caught my eye because this was something I used to experience frequently when working with venues on music policy. Most businesses are pretty reluctant to…
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What does classical music mean to kids?
In 2009 I organised a concert with a friend, in aid of Save The Children. Wanting some kind of visual substitute for programme notes, we asked pupils from local primary schools (aged 6-11) to listen to the music we’d be performing and draw pictures to represent how it made them feel. What we got back…