Review by: Alex Alex
There is a perpetual problem of credibility with any type of the „new“ music. People want to learn new things, never a new language. A new language will fail, same as the old one – and we know it from our bitter, unsaid experience. Rather than helping, the new devices will stand in the way — it is not that «The Dark Side of the Moon» benefits much from the Wall of Sound — however the sight of that wall of sound resisting, in its quiet desperation, the tides of the old-fashioned, rhymed truths – that sight is spectacular.
Yet, what if there is something new in the “new” music? We must take the old instruments to reveal that which is new. Which is what Ligeti does or, rather, did at that moment of time – today we do not really understand why he didn’t use the plain old synthesizers as all those musicians of old. Time has flatten things – we can do ambient noises on all kinds of devices and it just so happens that the “electronic” devices fit for that much more than the plain old orchestra.
Yet, what is interesting, the music of Ligeti needs no handicap in the form of any explanation – no Stockhausen aliens, no Pink Floyd drugs, no John Cale’s Lou Reed, nothing whatever. Same as with pornography – once we hear a requiem we know what kind of music it is.
Of course, it was ideally suited for the Kubrick movie – as double-sided as the movie is – sci-fi and the evil AI for the young, a tale of an old man dying without acquiring a slightest understanding of ANYTHING – for the elder.
This is what music does – it defies language and thus glorifies human existence. It never cares about the new synthesizers-alphabets, the same musicians use the same instruments as before, – and for a brief moment we have something new, something which has not yet been labeled, tape-recorded and manufactured – which is still Requiem and which we understand without understanding. Something, which makes us the Kubrick astronauts for a very brief moment – just before everything gets buried under the monolithic satanic synthesizer falling down on this Earth from the skies.
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