The Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late and the melody is a bar early

December 19, 2018 9:33 PM

The Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late and the melody is a bar early
the title pretty much says it all

Role: arranger

posted by speicus (9 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by bondcliff on December 20, 2018: The Moonlight Sonata but the bass is a bar late and the melody is a bar early

yessss
posted by cortex at 9:33 PM on December 19, 2018

Interesting! I got a very 'creepy' vibe from it, as if I were watching the suspenseful bit of a thriller.
posted by Mogur at 5:35 AM on December 20, 2018

thanks i hate it
posted by uncleozzy at 6:00 AM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

me, with zero background in classical music: i kind of like it
my partner, with extensive background in classical music: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
posted by brook horse at 8:08 AM on December 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

I LOVE IT SO MUCH and the person who taught me about music theory and experimental composing also liked it.
posted by Tesseractive at 1:50 PM on December 20, 2018

Oh man my classically-trained, perfect pitch-having, used-to-sing-with-the-bso wife is going to HATE this. I can't wait to show it to her.

Me, I can't tell that there's anything wrong with it. Invulnerability to this sort of thing is the only advantage to not having a musical bone in my body.
posted by bondcliff at 1:52 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

Oooooooooooooh!!!
posted by mochapickle at 2:27 PM on December 20, 2018

I hate that this sounds fine to my declining ears. It’s like not getting the joke that everyone is howling over.

(Anybody care to explain it?)
posted by iamkimiam at 11:39 PM on December 20, 2018

It depends on a mix of specific familiarity with Moonlight Sonata and generally being steeped in the harmonic conventions of westerns classical music, I guess. Because this piece sounds like two things to me:

1. Tonally adventurous, modern piano music, or
2. Someone fucking up Moonlight Sonata spectacularly.

If I wasn't already familiar with Moonlight Sonata, it'd just sound to me like some 20th C. experimental piano composition; the juxtapositions of elements from traditionally incompatible harmonic structures (bass note that doesn't "fit" middle notes that don't fit upper note) combined with the way those weird juxtapositions don't then fairly quickly and decisively resolve to a more compatible setup isn't something you heard a whole ton of back in the guts of western musical history. It sounds like someone purposefully defying musical convention, basically.

But Moonlight Sonata is such a big heavy stone in the field of classical composition that for a lot of folks it's unavoidably recognizable, and maybe not just as something they've heard a couple times but something they know like the back of their hands (or have played with the front of them). And it's a really sparse, delicate piece that does almost all of its work through subtle note-by-note shifts in this continuing arpeggiated pattern with slow ringing bass notes below and a lonely, stripped-down melody on top.

So any change is going to feel noticeable, and a change as fundamental as offsetting the timing elements of core harmonic components of the song is the equivalent of sparsely, delicately blasting a car horn for four minutes.

One of the things I like about it is that it doesn't sound bad, per se, and yet that cultural weight it carries means that for folks from whom it sounds wrong it sounds ear-breakingly, unfathomably wrong. Like a porcelain doll with the eyes and the mouth in the wrong place. The pieces are still all there, but something has gone terribly awry in an unsettling way.
posted by cortex at 8:11 AM on December 21, 2018 [15 favorites]