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As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play. This, however, is just ridiculous. The thing is, it's not at
by blackhole 13y ago
As a pianist and an electronic musician, I never have any qualms about making music I can't play.
This, however, is just ridiculous.
The thing is, it's not at all hard to write a piano piece that's unplayable. Simply add a third note group far enough above or below the existing two note groups and it will be physically impossible to play (unless someone else helps you). It doesn't need to be a grotesque fountain of millions of notes to be unplayable. This is better examined not as impossible music, but as an experiment that asks the question "how many notes can you use at the same time and still make a coherent song?"
The debate between music that's playable and music that's impossible would be better served by more realistic examples, instead of a small sub-culture.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoEver played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor? 4 well separated simultaneous note groups in a couple of places. That makes it theoretically impossible to play...
- CodeMage 13y agoIgudesman & Joo have their own way of playing stuff like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w
- lstamour 13y agoI love these guys. Saw them live once. :)
- leephillips 13y agoThis had me in tears of laughter. What a genius.
- ajtaylor 13y agoPure genius, and funny too! I couldn't resist posting that link on facebook.
- juletide 13y agoYou could make the gap between those note groups wider and it would become impossible. Even then, it is impossible to play for some—my piano teacher had rather small hands and had to "cheat" by dropping out notes if she was going to try Rachmaninoff.
- npsimons 13y agoI'm assuming that since you bring up Rachmaninoff, you know that he reportedly had freakishly large hands, and was in the habit of writing things he could play, but others considered "impossible". To me, that's significantly different than black MIDI, which just seems silly, albeit vaguely amusing.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoI'm actually only referring to a couple of places in Prelude in C# minor. Most of the song is "almost impossible" for one reason or another, but there are a couple of places near the end where the lower octaves and the upper freakish chords are played simultaneously. The 9th and 11th measure from the end, to be precise. Even Rachmaninoff with his freak hands had to roll that.
- avdd_ 13y agoIt's not a song, it's a prelude. And actually not very technically difficult, one reason for its immediate and enduring popularity. The simultaneous chords are just played very quickly one after the other and not "rolled".
- bryanlarsen 13y ago"not very technically difficult" is a matter of perspective. It's about as difficult a piece as any student or amateur is ever going to play or be exposed to and few students or amateurs are skilled enough to play it. But it is accessible to amateurs, and sounds very impressive. Which is, as you noted, a good reason why it's so popular. It's a good piece to pull out when you want to show off.
- ars 13y ago> large hands Can't they make the piano keys a little smaller (narrower)?
- nitrogen 13y agoSure, but it could take considerable time to adapt one's muscle memory to the different key spacing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- normloman 13y agoA piano piece requiring 3 hands isn't impossible to play. You just need a second person to help you play it. ;)
- blackhole 13y agoYes, but by that same logic, no music is impossible to play. Just keep adding people to help you. Eventually, you'll be able to play it. This is why the entire "impossible" argument rapidly stops making sense, because you simply have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere, and it becomes a question of impracticality, not impossibility.
- romaniv 13y agoOr you can help yourself with your foot, like Jason D. Williams occasionally does.
- raverbashing 13y agoThat's called an Organ Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijQWm4H-zBU&noredirect=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijQWm4H-zBU&noredirect=1
- bjz_ 13y agoOriginal video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16oaGSltUPE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16oaGSltUPE (thought she deserved the credit!)
- jerf 13y agoI found the result to be a rather monotonous sameyness. The sound of "all the piano keys being smashed" overwhelms everything else about the piece, and the end result is that for all the apparent energy, the end result is really quite boring. Contrasted to its acoustic opposite, chip-tune minimalism, and I'll take chip-tune anyday, even in its "pure" form (limited polyphony, no postprocessing, etc, just as you would have found it back in the day).
- aimhb 13y agoI appreciate Black MIDI not really as a "cool gimmick" but more as a genre of music. In my opinion, its main function and appeal is to embody music that is still pleasing to the ear, even if it would be impossible in practice. The majority of the pieces linked to in this thread probably aren't the best example of this, but I think Dream Battle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzy_WrH8v7U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzy_WrH8v7U) is quite good in this regard. The piece itself is just a normal piece -- it only happens to be unplayable, and since it is unplayable, there are a number of Black-MIDI-specific "extended techniques" that can be employed (as you'll see).
- jerf 13y agoIt's better, yes. Still not my taste, but less monotonous. Still, I'm not sure this "genre" has a lot of depths to explore. Their time and their choice, of course.
- tesseractive 13y agoRock started as music most people thought was too simple to be interesting, and so did jazz and a lot of early electronic music. I think it's really premature to write off a music style most people haven't even heard of yet. Given how much interesting music (IMO) has come from things like serialist classical, I suspect it's only a matter of time before someone finds ways of producing interesting sorts of tone color that are more difficult to achieve via other methods.
- 13y ago
- acjohnson55 13y agoI don't see why this is ridiculous. I don't think that physical playability/unplayability is the key feature here. What does it really mean to be "unplayable" anyway? When you play piano, is it your body that generates the sound, or are you manipulating a machine that generates it for you? There's a delay between notating a MIDI file and hearing the resulting sound, but the same goes for the time between your finger hitting the key and the hammers hitting the string. I'm not saying there isn't a distinction between live performance and pre-production, but I think we're better off looking at playability as a spectrum than a binary value. We could critique the medium, but people have abused instruments and sound makers for generations. Look up prepared piano [1], glitch music [2], and the wide world of guitar effects. This is just another way exploring the possibilities of a given medium (MIDI, in this case). Theoretically, we could generate all possible music just by adding together sine waves, but realistically, most music is only accessible by using far more limited mechanisms, like instruments, gadgets, and paradigmatic software, which in turn influence the creative process. A person is definitely free to critique the artistic merits of a given piece, but I think it's rather close-minded to critique an entire medium. Most of the styles of music we listen to were (or still are) considered cheating by adherents to some other style. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepared_piano [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joezydeco 13y agoI'm curious to know what you think about dubstep, then.
- the_cat_kittles 13y agoi think its really about the video more than the music
- nobodysfool 13y agoIt's not really 'unplayable' it's simply not playable by a single pianist at a single keyboard. It would entirely be possible to have 30 pianists at 30 keyboards playing these songs. The question then becomes, "Why?"
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago> The question then becomes, "Why?" Why not? [/argument] Not everything needs to be done for a practical reason; that's most art.