![]() The hard rockers' music resembles a British ambulance siren and the lyrics describe the gory aftermath of a plane crash as a man is tended to by an EMT. One-hit wonders Bloodrock improbably scored a Top 40 hit with a gruesome, eight-and-a-half minute, first-person account of dying. György Ligeti, “Volumina for Organ” (1962).Some older orchestra musicians don’t want to learn anything new.” With so-called normal symphony orchestras, sometimes I refuse to have this piece in the program, because it takes too much rehearsal. These things are unusual, even after 50 years. “Some notation that I invented at that time is now common, but there are still some special techniques, different types of vibrato, playing on the tailpiece of the bridge, playing directly behind the bridge. “For some pieces, like the ‘Threnody,’ I prefer young people to perform it, because they are still open to learn,” Penderecki told Resident Advisor. Naturally, the sound of the Polish composer has become shorthand for the tense and psychologically suffocating in film: Both The Shining and Children of Men use the piece and his music informed Jonny Greenwood’s score to There Will Be Blood and Mica Levi’s score to Under the Skin. Instruments are smacked, bows are sawed across places bows weren’t intended, and the entire orchestra hums like a swarm of angry bees. Music scholars call this trailblazing piece of 20th Century classical music an exemplary use of “sonorism”– but this dark cloud for 52 strings is more simply described as controlled anarchy. Krzystof Penderecki, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960).Over the years, the titular victim hailed from a variety of towns – from Oxford, England to Wexford, Ireland – which suggests, terrifyingly enough, that just about every locale had at least one bloodthirsty woman-slayer to be sung about. (Though really, the murderer doesn't sound any more repentant in jail then he had when he was dumping his slain gal in the river then heading home to bed.) First recorded in its recognizable modern form in the 1920s, "Knoxville Girl" in fact drew from material that had been floating around for centuries, maybe traceable back to a real-life 17th Century killing in Wittam, England. On the recording they made for their 1956 debut LP Tragic Songs of Life (later a country hit), Ira and Charlie Louvin harmonize with grim rectitude over a brisk, easy waltz rhythm that adds to the fatalism of its crisply moralistic ending, with the violent creep wasting away in prison. Maybe the best-known Appalachian murder ballad is the first-person account of an apparently otherwise ordinary Tennessee fellow who inexplicably takes time out from a stroll with his sweetheart to beat her to death with a stick despite her heartbreaking protests.
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