I listen to a lot of music, by a lot of bands. Every now and then, every few years, a song truly strikes me, to the extent that I (with my butterfly's attention span) can listen to it dozens of times in a week, finding new twists, harmonies, intricacies of rhythm and nuances of lyric. It's quite a 17-year-old thing to do, I suppose, but one I am glad not to have grown out of in the decades that have followed. I think that the songs that have attracted me like this down throug the years tend towards several features: playfulness, complexity and length (never mind the quality, feel the width!) They tend to be in minor keys, often with either a drone (it's the influence of the bagpipes, I tell you), repeated figures, or a middle-eastern feeling.
I suppose the first one I can remember was when I was 10 or 11, and was Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Not a bad place to start, I'd say. And yet this apparently complex piece is (while technically gruelling to play and often astonishingly modern in its use of chords and shapes bordering on atonalism) strikingly simple to understand, even if you know nothing much about music and can't read a jot of notation.
One fun way to see the trickery and complexity of this piece, without needing to read music, is to look at this version of it. Here, you can see a visualisation of each note, of the figures and patterns Bach uses, and spot where they reappear, transposed or reversed. You can see the shapes of the music, especially in the fugue section. It starts at around 2:50, and then you immediately see the same figure (series or pattern of notes) repeated with the right hand (the top rows, in brown) seconds later. Then again at 3:13 in purple, and again and again throughout. Look at 3:46, where the bottom pattern (played with the feet, here) lies under a variation on the same shapes being played simultaneously with the right hand (at the top).
See how striking the patterns are when displayed in visual form: the human eye can see the curves, twists and sinusoidal patterns of the sounds, and understand them better: look at the flowing falls in the notes at 4:06, or the transpositions of the regular rise and fall at 4:22. And if you ever wanted to understand suspended notes (where a chord sounds like a dischord - jarring and incomplete, then resolves itself into something complete and pleasing) then go to 8:07 and watch the slowly resolving series of chords.
The same formalism and mathematical playfulness of the music that attracted modernists like Berg to Bach also make it easier to see just what he is up to in this format.
Anyway, more to come. I don't want to make this too terrifying a wall of :words: Next up, Tool's 10,000 Days (Wings for Marie Pt2) and A Perfect Circle's Judith. Can you possibly wait?