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MP3 Joey Allred - Solo Piano - Vol 1 - Modern

"Modern" spontaneously invents and edits and refines its own structure based on formal qualities that are tied to each song .


12 MP3 Songs in this album (46:57) !
Related styles: Jazz: Avant-Garde Jazz, Classical: Modernist, Featuring Piano

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Details:
Joey Allred - Piano
Pensacola, FL

CURRENT

I have spent quite a long time thinking about this music and about how to characterize it. First, let us agree that it is music.

This is electronic music because electronics are required in order to hear it. It has always been made of charged electrons and later it became binary data. Some of these charged electrons reside in the body of the composer and some were of the kind of electricity that you have to pay for-that is transmitted through currents, cords etc.

Because this music was improvised, it was composed and performed simultaneously. It seems to me that this is a fairly normal circumstance considering the history of human music-making. All music contains certain questions and answers. The questions and answers that improvised music contains tend to relate to instrument and structure.

First, instrument. On this work, Joey Allred played a digital piano.

Second, structure (Once I was listening to Steve Reich being interviewed on the radio and he said “Music IS structure.” Do you agree?)

This music spontaneously invents and edits and refines its own structure based on formal qualities that are tied to each song. For example, a unique interval or rhythmic figure or way of touching the keyboard arises during each track. In turn, each of these motifs encodes and decodes what happens next for that particular track. Within this conceptual framework, Joey Allred created two works, titled “Volume 1 – Modern” and “Volume 2 – Ambient” that are also one work. He told me he made them at the same time more or less. He would do one “Modern” song and then one “Ambient” song, More or less.

VOLUME 1 – MODERN

Some people have very particular notions of what is and is not jazz, but I can’t remember what they are anymore. People have all sorts of notions.

If Coleman Hawkins made it, it must be jazz. I am not sure if Volume 1 is jazz or not. I can think of a few reasons why it might not be. The reasons why not tend to boil down to the fact that it was not made by Coleman Hawkins, etc. On the other hand it might be jazz. I can think of a few reasons why.

This is modern music because it is structured in terms of process. That is to say, you can see the parts moving. I think that “parts moving” is the definitive trait of modern music. If a contemporary composer is making music which has parts but these parts appear to be fixed or opaque, or for whatever reason the process by which the music is composed is obscured, I would not call that modern music. It may or may not be music, but it is not modern.

VOLUME 2 – AMBIENT

Ambient music is like furniture. Extraordinary ambient music is like extraordinarily useful and beautiful furniture.

The choices that the composer made to create this particular furniture are choices of rhythm and mode.

All sound (not just music) is rhythmic. Even if one decides that a 30 second segment of a 440 Hz sine wave is free of stops and starts that we would typically call rhythm, the wave is still rhythmic (440 cycles/30 seconds). Like space and time, the line between rhythm and pitch dissolves upon close inspection. Volume 2 is a particularly excellent explanation of this idea.

All of these compositions retain the basic pattern of emphasizing 7 of the 12 pitches which most Western music uses. If T is a half step (1/12th of the whole series) and W is a whole step (1/6th), this pattern is W-W-T-W-W-W-T. The different compositions use a root that is any of the notes (say, for example the second W) but the spacing stays the same.

Volume 2 is pulse driven, which I find both soothing and exciting. I even find it nostalgic in that it reminds me of the earlobe music of my youth.

One hears the sound of the world in pulses.

Liner Notes: Rhys Ziemba
Cover Art Painting: Art Carnrick

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