Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz (all musicians please view)
 

Here's a fantastic new piece of music a friend just shared with me:

http://i.imgur.com/YFgqH.gif

Can it be performed? Yes!


(Skip to 3:55 if you get tired of the history of the piece.)

wow..........i mean......




just wow.


that was an awful piece of....music

The art is in the score, not the performance.

Unless you look at the performance as its own parody.

What sheet music would look like if Pollack was a musician.

Actually trying to play Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz is to miss the point entirely.

So what is the point then?

I'm not a musician, so all I see is "Hey, let's throw every kind of notation on one sheet and see what it looks like."

Am I missing something crucial?

It's a musician's joke, so if you don't have classical training you may very well be missing something crucial. Asking for a passage that crescendos from forte to quintuple forte (or fortisisisissimo, if you prefer) to be played delicately, for example, is absurd. So is an 8 note chord with each individual note holding a different accidental, and so on; everything on the chart is designed as a visual gag.

If you know enough about music to understand what all the markings mean, it's funny because of the absurdity. If you don't, I suppose it just becomes so much crap on a page.

I'd liken the whole thing to the sort of slap-dash humour you might find in Mad Magazine, only nerdier.

Amusing. And even more so, I actually liked the instrumental part. So very chaotic sounding. I wish I could hear just that without the annoying shouts and such.

I'm sorry but if you see the instructions "Have a nice day," "release the penguins" and "untie slip knot" and don't immediately know it's a joke then you are stupid.

i like the instruction "like a dirigible" and can imagine long drunken debates with a collective about how to approach that passage in a way that is, in fact, like a dirigible.

Well, and instructions like "become increasingly agitated" and "bow real fast slippage may occur" are bloody hysterical to anyone who played in high school band like I did. There's also a subtext of visual humor like "remove cattle from stage" and "moon walk". It's a brilliant creation.

Trying to implement it in meat-space is like giving a reading of e e cummings--it's just missing the point. "A leaf falls". Hunh?

A wonderful joke, ruined completely by attempting to perform the thing. My sister actually has the sheet music up in her apartment, and I'm pretty sure it got passed around by someone or another in my high school band/musical theater group. I'd rather forgotten about it, but knew immediately what it was as soon as I saw the title.

It really works much more effectively as a sight gag. "Listening to" or "watching" that performance was painfully awkward and in no way captured the impression you get actually looking at the score (assuming you can read the notation, of course). I guess the internet continuously proves that someone, somewhere is always (ALWAYS) willing to try to do the absurd just to try to do the absurd. Next time friends, next time.

Ya, fuck those assholes for having a good time:shakehead:

They're allowed to do whatever they want. I'm allowed to think they wasted their time. I'm not going to post on the youtube page or show up at their house and tell them they suck ass, but I have every right to think that it was a stupid, awkward performance that I neither enjoyed nor in any way enhanced my appreciation for the piece of "music" in question.

There's a sister piece to this, which includes notation such as "saxes move downstage."

I'm pretty sure I've seen this before or something like it passed around the halls of my music college when I attended. Like others have mentioned its really more of a joke about complexity in music and just from looking at it (if you can read sheet music) you can tell it was never intended to be taken seriously.

I remember doing stuff like this in college actually. We would write out something ridiculously and needlessly complex and try to fool underclassmen into learning it. "You'll need to know this next year dude, get a head start...seriously".

I don't have a solid answer, but from my knowledge of history it might be best that whatever you decide on, you stop doing it before flame slightly higher and higher.