This was an eerie piece. I liked how sparse it was. I think silence can mean as much as sound does. The metallic shaker sound (I'm not sure what it was exactly) sounded a little like a bag of coins being dropped or something. I liked it. I also loved the flutes. Recording one and then playing against it again created a really ethereal sound, but this was less airy than in the Alexander piece. I couldn't decide if it sounded like whale song or wolves howling. I think towards the beginning it sounded more like wolves and later it was whales. Also later I heard something high pitched and a touch whiny like an insect sound, but that might have been the sound of the flutes interacting with each other.
This piece is definitely not settled or harmonic and super easy to listen to, and there's no set meter, but there is a sort of orderly feeling to it, making it significantly easier to listen to than the Alexander piece. I don't think it has the really unsettled feeling of the Alexander, and it doesn't change too much throughout the piece, meaning it doesn't require quite as much attention. It actually is kind of meditative or trance-like.
Alexander's And the whole air is tremulous
I thought the title of this one was appropriate, because on top of being flutes, which sound airy generally, he layered tracks in a way that had the vibratos at different speeds. Also things were slightly out of tune with eachother, which lent to this haunting wind-howling-through-the-trees kind of feel.
The section that started at about four minutes was really wild. I couldn't quite figure out what the percussive sound was, but I think it was some kind of pitched drum, maybe out of a gourd or something, since it wasn't a very sharp sound. I love the way everything was edited together in that section, especially the flute sounds that have had something done to them to make them sound synthesized, the weird attack sound (I can't describe it any better than that). I could tell that there were some spots that had been reversed, since the attack sounded backwards, a swoopy kind of sound. Also, the section after that when the music swells and there are suddenly too many wind sounds to count is great because of the polyphony that turns into a homophonic harmonic thing. It's so effective because it's frenetic. The really dissonant long held out notes are great too. The whole thing is just so unsettled, it fits the title so well.
The section that started at about four minutes was really wild. I couldn't quite figure out what the percussive sound was, but I think it was some kind of pitched drum, maybe out of a gourd or something, since it wasn't a very sharp sound. I love the way everything was edited together in that section, especially the flute sounds that have had something done to them to make them sound synthesized, the weird attack sound (I can't describe it any better than that). I could tell that there were some spots that had been reversed, since the attack sounded backwards, a swoopy kind of sound. Also, the section after that when the music swells and there are suddenly too many wind sounds to count is great because of the polyphony that turns into a homophonic harmonic thing. It's so effective because it's frenetic. The really dissonant long held out notes are great too. The whole thing is just so unsettled, it fits the title so well.
Babbitt's None but the Lonely Flute
The entire time I listened to this I was thinking that it's beautiful and haunting, and I could hear fragments of a theme, but I couldn't figure out what in the world it had to do with electroacoustic music. It's only one flute line. I could hear that the line is very disjunct, but unless I know very little about flutes (which is entirely possible) I think that this didn't require piecing together of tracks or some other electronic fiddling, and I didn't hear any effects. I was really confused. I knew Milton Babbit was a famous composer who used the 12 tone series, and I knew he did some experimenting with electronic music, but I still failed to see the correlation between that and this particular piece.
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