We should expect musicians to continue combining genres and styles in increasingly inventive and fascinating ways, often blurring the lines between "high" and "low" art. The best examples will be the musicians who understand the musical puzzle pieces they combine to create something clever. Take this song that mixed rap with Gregorian chant, all in the name of selling shoes during the NBA playoffs several years back.


Gregorian chant gets a "Second Coming" with help from hip-hop

As generations of kids who grew up playing video games mature and become a market force, some composers are looking to give game soundtracks the full symphonic treatment - in the same way composers before them sought to elevate and validate folk tunes.


For composers, is video game music the new folk music?

Composers like John Cage, Henry Cowell, and George Crumb wanted to explore not just sound and timbre but other musical elements such as harmony or time. Like scientists who worked simultaneously to unlock the atom and the particles within to better understand the nature of the physical world, experimental composers pulled apart, examined, and pushed the boundaries of the musical elements of their world.


Cacti, crotales, and Crumb: A short history of strange sounds in classical music

Throughout history, classical instruments have found homes outside the orchestra, where they've often been played quite differently. Take, for example, an ongoing love affair indie rock bands have had with the trumpet since the mid-2000s.


Why didn't Neutral Milk Hotel hire the Canadian Brass?

Intentionally or unintentionally, early video game composers mirrored some of the composition practices of Baroque-era composers, for many of the same reasons.


Eight-bit Baroque: Basso continuo in the early Nintendo period

The video is an homage, by Chicago composer and video artist Patrick Lidell, to composer Alvin Lucier's 1969 piece I Am Sitting in a Room. Lucier's original piece uses two tape recorders and, as his "instrument," the room in which he sat. The composer recorded a short narration and then played that back from one tape recorder to another. Each repetition resulted in a slow and steady degradation until the only sound left was the haunting natural resonance of the room.


Ricky O'Bannon

Recent Contributions