I just got back from It's Only Natural restaurant ("ION" for those in-the-know), where I played an 11 minute exerpt from my Ann Coulter reshuffled piece. I was on last. Yeah.
About a third of third of the people there just got up and left. Many just sort of looked disturbed. One guy afterwards, trying to give feedback, was explaining to me that regular people sort of expected music to have a conflict and a climax and a beginning and an end and some sort of structure connecting those things together. He also told me an anecdote about how he was learning tape music stuff, somebody from U Conn (University of Connecticut, not an Alaska institution) gave his class feedback about what would work and what didn't and how they were trying to build sounds into something and this guy talking to me was doing something with sped up voices and the teacher said, "get rid of those Mickey Mouse voices."
so everybody there clearly hated it. Except for Deborah, the MC, who is also a grad student at Wesleyan. Deborah is dedicated to the hammer dulcimer. She loved Old Time Music, because it features dulcimer. And she loves Turkish music, because it features dulcimer. And most of the music I've heard her praise is part of the dulcimer world.
Deborah loved my piece.
I dunno whether to feel The Hub-style elitist glory or to abandon my Ann Coulter efforts. I do know that it was an extremely long eleven minutes.
Did I mention that I get terrible stage fright?
4 comments:
Hi this is Polly.
Now I REALLY wanna hear it. :)
Congratulations on freaking the mundanes!
I have a mp3 at http://rc.xkey.com/~celesteh/music/wesleyan/coulter-gone-wild-2.mp3
The version I did abbreviated the first part a bit, so the total time was 10 or 11 minutes. And, of, course, every time I run the software, the result it different.
Stage fright's for wimps! Get over it!
maybe the audience would have reacted differently if they weren't expecting music. if they'd been expecting political satire or commentary, documentary material, or something like that, the piece might not have clashed so severely with their expectations.
i wouldn't give up on the piece at all.
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