What is lyrical? Why is a melody or a tune, for instance a simple song more lyrical then a drum beat?
Is it really so? Yes in a traditional muscial way of thinking I guess it is so. That doesn´t mean that a POP SONG CAN´T BE LYRICAL.

So why do I think about this? Well right now I am a little bit into the anti-art business and I realized that it would be a nice challenge to try to write a lyrical piece for a single percussionist playing only bass drum (Gran Cassa), snare drum and, triangle. That does not sound particularly lyrical or poetical but if we concider which muscial factors that create the feeling of lyricism maybe there is a possibility.

My thoughts are that lyricism beginns with small differences. Think of a person who only can speak in a monotonuos way, on one tone. It would not take long until we were screaming to him/her to shut up. And if he/she didn´t we would run out holding our ears creaming loud. A melody is lyrical because it is made up of small differences between different tones that are composed in a varied and "musical" way. Which in this case means many things but one is that the melody is selfreflecting and not repeating itself unnecessarily or creating a feeling of standing still. Repetitions can be used in away that makes us know that it is the same song but varied so that there is some difference on a higher formal level. 

So now im trying to achieve this in my small percussion piece called "simple melody". This variation of tones is now transfomed into variations of tempo and dynamics in small steps. My plan ist to avoid all conncetions in the piece were you can feel a totally regular tempo. Instead you can almost feel the tempo,but a second later you realize that it was a mistake. And so its goes on. On some place I guess you can recognize some part of the piece from earlyier but in a varied way. It will be a good piece. 2008-10-24 23:23:23