Doom. A Sigh
– Istvan Marta
I’ve always been interested in music that evokes an emotional response. As a performer and listener, having an emotional connection to a piece makes it feel significantly more satisfying. When looking for pieces to match the extreme amount of angst I was feeling at the time (also to put said angst into perspective by having my privilege checked) I began to search for music that was revolving around an intense political movement (something along the lines of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time) and came across the piece “Doom. A Sigh” (https://open.spotify.com/track/1hCNaY6jPujUZjS13qK6bP).
The piece is easily one of the darkest pieces I have ever heard, as it combines the use of electronic sound effects with percussion and string quartet alongside “old sounding” recordings of two women speaking/singing. They appear to be talking/singing about something very that makes them very sad and/or angry. After reading the notes by Marta (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-LQ7nBQcjA&t=0m00s), I understood the context; these women were from the remote village of Trunk, Romania, and were part of the group of around 400 people who lived there called the Csangos. These people had been uninfluenced by the progression of language in the 19th century due to their lack of connection to society and the progression of media. Their language was dying out due to the fact that people rarely left the village, and children would receive education in a language they were unfamiliar with. “…an encroaching government was wearing their sense of identity and family bonds”. Marta recorded these women and actually used one of Bartok’s 3 tiers of composition, in which he created an accompaniment to the exact melody recorded (with the melody being these two women). One of the women is talking about her deceased parents and the other is singing about a battle. Marta then talks about his circumstances with getting the recording and how the people were actually punished for him doing so. He accurately depicts these events happening through his music, and this is through being able to use technology of the recording, and electronics that create this scene of oppression.
Rarely before had a piece moved me so much that I looked up the situations surrounding the piece on my own. I had always been of the mindset that music is only relevant to the listener, but this piece had proven me wrong. I had heard such an intensity of emotion that motivated me to learn more about how this came together as a piece of music, and that was due to the bizarre nature of the musical instrumentation (ie, the recording of the women and the battlefield setting created with electronics)
I think that pieces like this was only really possible through the advances of technology in the 20th century, as the level of recording that had developed now can give rise to a new type of communication in a piece of music. For this, it was conveying the oppression of a society. Although the listener is unable to understand what exactly the speaker is saying, you are immediately able to grasp the emotion and power behind this work. In the past, when a piece (like a symphony) uses a motive to represent a certain idea, and would incorporate politics into this by inserting the motive at a certain time, there is still a sort of “code” needed to decipher the meaning, whereas with this, you immediately are captivated by the emotion and are curious as to what the meaning is, even though this work is nowhere near anything standard of the previous century. This made me think of the article in which Trump brought up symphonies and somehow used them to convert this idea of elitism to prove whatever ridiculous point he was trying to make. This piece is definitely not a symphony, and in fact some people would maybe describe this more as performance art, as it does not have a standard form that we would be used to in Western music, however, I believe that the confusion itself adds to the meaning if the piece. The piece puts us in this uncomfortable state in which we question many things: what do they mean? how did something like this happen? what happened?. These questions allow for the growth as an individual both politically and musically due to the fact that we do not know, yet are still extremely captivated.(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/arts/music/trump-classical-music.html?smid=tw-%20nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0)
HI Noel
I found your article very interesting. I agree that new technologies such as the field recorder and the supporting infrastructure (i.e widespread internet) can amplify the voices of marginalized peoples. We have seen recording devices do this in a non-musical setting during the recent unrest in Ferguson. People who traditionally don’t find recourse with the american judicial system or are unfairly targeted by the police can now record their encounters with police and share these encounters over social media. However, it is unusual to have media this thoroughly incorporated into the musical structure of music. It’s as if they took Bartok’s method one step further. Whereas Bartok would faithfully transcribe the music and then reharmonize it, this group used the recording as the melody itself. Furthermore, the captured the linguistic tradition of these people aswell by harmonizing their spoken words and inflections. One hopes that this recording will serve as a time capsule to record and preserve these people’s language as it gradually fades out of use.