Yoko Kanno and lots of music

Before I recently decided to really absorb Cowboy Bebop from first episode to the end, I downloaded the first OST (out of what I thought the total number of OSTs was FOUR... but there are more soundtracks out there) because I knew I would love it if it was Yoko Kanno who worked on it. She quickly became one of my favorite Japanese anime composers after I got the Wolf's Rain soundtrack, PAR EXEMPLE:

(So much batucada it hurts... I truly felt she did an incredible job with all of her samba pieces in the soundtrack, and everyone's favorite, Valse de la Lune, too.)

To be honest I have a natural affinity to samba and bossa nova or anything pretty darn close, so I felt the winning piece in the Cowboy Bebop music collection was Wo Qui Non Coin:

I also really appreciate how appropriately timed each song is in the episodes. When WQNC was playing while Faye left the coast after finally getting an idea of who she really was, I bawled instantly. That was episode 24, and it was perfect even at episode 4 when Faye and Spike were speeding out of hyperspace to Too Good Too Bad before it closed. The last two episodes? Okay. I bawled when Faye found her identity and lost it again. That was an emotional experience for me, but the last two episodes drained all my emotions for the next few days. If you'll remember, Yoko Kanno took The Real Folk Blues, transposed it down by 1, took the bass to a new level, and called it See You Space Cowboy. That's is how you say goodbye to a protagonist. I was not okay stable immediately after finishing the series, but she treated Spike well. She also includes Ilaria Graziano in all her projects, too, which I found in Einstein Groovin' just today.

So anyway, those were the animes that should have consumed my childhood but in reality I had Sailor Moon and .hack//SIGN. I had and still have a lot of love for those animes, too, definitely. I just think I might have grown up to be a much cooler musician and high school student had I grown up with Cowboy Bebop and Wolf's Rain along with the others. No matter, love is love, and these will stay by me forever, and hopefully Kids on the Slope - which I just watched last week... which makes me all psyched for the rest of the series... which, in comparison to the incredibly boring animation of Nodame Cantabile, makes me all psyched to see a music-based anime with convincing animations.

TR TR TR TRAILER!

 

Directed by Shinichi Watanabe, music by Yoko Kanno
There isn't any question about whether or not this is a good anime.
It is. Watch it.

-Out.

Me and 20th cent

Béla Bartók
March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945

Twentieth century composers are the bad boys in my life. As a Theory 1 student, I really should just focus on Baroque composers right now as I clearly am not ready to handle 20th cent anything if all I can say about a Bartók chamber piece is that it's dissonant. (Oh I mean... it's built off Hungarian folk and stuff. Based in a harmonic minor key, maybe even a double harmonic minor key. Get a little gypsy in there and I sound supposedly more suitable for 20th cent.) My IB Extended Essay is on Ravel's orchestration techniques, too. I don't know what I was thinking, but I can't change the topic, plus I'm pretty psyched to be working on it with our school's choir director (who has a doctorate in orchestral conducting), but anyway...

Maurice Ravel
March 7, 1875 – December 28, 1937

My interest in 20th cent started with the French, from Saint-Saëns, to Debussy, to Ravel, and I guess to an extent Fauré. And since the District Honors Orchestra event I took part in this January -- when we played Dances of Transylvania -- I've taken interest to more Eastern composers from Bartók to Khachaturian and now to Stravinsky. I also keep Vivaldi, Handel and Bach close to my heart, but they're like the best friends who will never leave me, (as I violinist I go through the Suzuki books and they all reek of Baroque) whereas I feel as though I lack a concrete connection to 20th cent composers. Once I listen to the first few measures of, say, Stravinsky's Petroushka or Khachaturian's Fantastic Waltz (piano duet), it's like seeing a live jazz performance, being glued to an outstanding performer and later thinking about him the rest of the night. I end up dreaming of one day being as impressive a bassist like him and spend hours at home just working through scales on the fretboard (or just fingerboard on double) because my motivation is just to be as good.

I want to be an impressive performer, but I think even more so, I want to be a composer.

I look up to these Eastern composers and think to myself "Holy crap, when do you think you're competent enough to write something like this?" Am I supposed to be submerged in the Eastern culture or is getting an excellent music education enough? Should I treat composing as a hobby like drawing and then hope that one day all the practice takes me where I want to be? At this point, I'm seventeen and am going to go to college in-state, at home. I really don't know what's going on in my life, and I don't know if it's God's will that I end up being a composer/arranger -- of if it is, that I end up doing it for purely art music or for something else. I mean, it is incredibly hard to make it as an art music composer in 21st cent United States. I'm no Aaron Copland. I'm Vietnamese, I work in a pentatonic setting, and almost always in A harmonic minor (these are things I notice as I play music with my church choir); maybe it isn't radical to assume that 20th cent Eastern European is just not for me. I'm also pretty darn dramatic and end up sounding like fatalist (haha!)

That's enough blogging, I'll just turn on the Firebird Suite and start going through the Bartok 44 Duets book I got last week and see what happens ten years from now.

An Introduction

(This blog started out as dissonantfugues.blogspot.com before I changed it to pointillisticmuses.blogspot.com.)

"Dissonant fugues" is the title to my IB Music paper drafted in my junior year of high school, which analyzed the fourth movement of Samuel Barber's piano sonata op. 26, Allegro con spirito. In essence it was a fugue -- constantly sequencing everywhere, contrapuntal, and very dissonant. I absolutely loved studying it for the paper, and although after I while I really couldn't take listening to it anymore, I sometimes return to it every now and then to enjoy one sit-through with it, thinking back to what I said and how I felt about it. I guess that's what life is. If our entire lives were to be written down, there'd be that one fugal movement, which in some would be very calm, Bach-like and dainty, and in others, sprinkling and dissonant like acid rain, like Barber.

This is me at seventeen, at a community-wide musical production in 2012 both my dad (not seen) and I had worked hard in and enjoyed every minute of.

I can't decide if my fugal movement is classically written or the latter. Either one would make the me of the future, and I guess by saying that I'll never know until it's resolved and done, and then I can look back, but it'd be nice to know now. I'm Annie, last name pending. My hobbies spread from painting, to performing, to writing, and my (albeit amateur) work is shared among other artists on the internet. I've got incredibly realist parents whom I'm grateful to for being realists while at the same time supporting my artistic endeavors, and along with that, friends and a community full of love, prayer and support. This is a view of my life, which I hope in the end turns out to be a grand symphony. In a flat key.

Outside of this blog I post ridiculous things on:

Tumblr - pbjammie
and Flickr - thuuuu