Author: nholloway

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KENZO World- The Ultimate Collaboration

“The eye is both feminine and powerful”

 

When creating a fragrance, many marketers will brand it with a certain celebrity or word, so the person buying it can feel associated with that in order to empower themselves to feel like they are one in the same as their new and powerful scent. A combination of a single word with a gorgeous celebrity and the scent of sandalwood lilac can cause mass amounts of people to flock to their nearest mall and go crazy. The smell of David Beckham is one thing, but what happens when you add the talents of fashion (Carol Lim and Humberto Leon), choreography (Ryan Huffington– choreographer of the Chandelier music video & Margaret Qualley), Spike Jones, and the song ‘Mutant Brain (ft Assassin)’?  All while referencing the earlier posted video by Fatboy Slim?????

You get KENZO World- The New Fragrance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABz2m0olmPg

This video itself is a modern day musical text painting that reflects the description of the perfume itself.

“KENZO WORLD reveals a new definition of femininity with its new perfume. This intense eau de parfum reveals the essence of a strong, bold, determined woman. In her image, Francis Kurkdjian and Maïa Lernout revisit the KENZO WORLD floral bouquet with addictively velvety black plum, sparkling peony and jasmine, and indulgent vanilla. A gourmet fragrance for any woman who dares to be herself. KENZO WORLD, an intense eau de parfum, reveals your power.”

This entire video is a redefinition of femininity. It begins with a woman leaving a fancy social event to grab a breath of fresh air, only to be able to let herself go from her mental societal constructs of who she is supposed to be and allow herself to have an explosion of expression in an unconventional way. This immediate change in mentality is shown in the introduction of the music, which itself has intense beat from the music of Ape Drums (an American DJ known for combining electro-dance music with Caribbean sounds/music). As she begins to let go, you see a sense of freedom on her face that shows her beginning to define herself. The idea of a constructed society is then shown with her interaction with the statue head. As she is moving around, she goes to the statue head and yells at it, which would have been considered absolutely improper of a scene like the one she was in a little while ago.

Spike Jones continues to show this idea of releasing your inner self beautifully throughout the rest of the video, showing the woman go between trying to keep herself bound to what she believes to be the “proper way” (for instance when she is trying to control her arm from moving about spastically) and allowing her to feel the freedom of breaking away from it (when she jumps through the eye and beats her chest while shouting).

 

This whole work of art greatly relates to the discussion of music and politics in the 20th C. The work is showing the breaking away from typical society in a setting that is totally unexpected, and does so so beautifully that it leaves a lasting impression on the viewer.

“I love this publicity cause it shows the woman by a really different way than the others publicities of fragrance. It shows the liberty and the power of women”

-Saku123 (youtube user)

In class we have talked a lot about collaborations of works, and works that are related to/make us think of real world experiences (like music for airports), but present them in a way in which they force the observer/listener to question the meaning of the work itself and the motives behind that. KENZO World does that above and beyond any other modern collaboration I have seen, and I believe works like this set a huge influence on the future of art and politics.

 

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Progression of Oppression and Technology

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)

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Technology of Percussion: Gesture and the drum

Drums and percussion instruments were some of the earliest forms of music. They were used as a way to communicate many different things. They have been used throughout time in militaries as a way to pace troops and intimidate their enemies,  used as part of religious ceremonies, and even some animals use drumming for mating. There are two main ways that I believe that have led to the progression of to what percussion is today: the technology of the drum itself, and the reason behind the act of drumming (which I am referring to as the technology of the gesture).

There are many different forms of gestures, a gesture of love, war, musical gesture, and I think that gestures have largely shaped the aspects of  percussion today. This is due to the fact that percussion is such a physical instrument compared to others. In a lot of contemporary works, body percussion has been used quite often in making good effect of a gesture. In the piece “?Corporel” by Vinko Globokar , The drum is actually removed entirely, and the piece is based off of gestures that depict a very dark story, and I think that this is a great example of what a gesture can represent: a motion that can communicate a certain emotion/thought/or action without words. “Corporel seems, on one level, to dehumanize the performer by transforming him into an instrument and stripping away the veneer of civilization – or at least it seems to make him regress into a sort of primal unconscious. At the same time, his gestures, percussive and vocal, generate an oddly compelling sense of authentic expression, one not filtered through convention.” Taking this piece, along with the video of the birds drumming for a mate, it draws attention that, even without some form of societal conditioning,  gestures are one of the more effective forms of communication. Gestures, although seemingly complex, haven’t themselves changed at all, although ways for using them has. As society and music started to evolve, and music/instruments began to do so as well, leading to developments of an aesthetic alongside music, the idea of virtuosity.

Physical gestures that relate to a musical gesture, as a performer, also allow us to help further along the understanding of a piece as well (example). In an intense atonal piece like this, using physical gestures really make the audience able to connect to the piece on a first listening, and I believe that this idea comes from dance. In dance, using physical gestures are used alone to show a story. As music becomes more intellectual, and some pieces (like the Mantovani) that wouldn’t be immediately understood, combining the music to gestures that were inherited by dancers (although not exactly a dance) is allowing percussionists to further explore new ways of performing. A middle ground between dance and the marimba piece would be this; this clearly has aspects of dance and percussion that are both using gestures to portray a narrative of playing with a ball.

A much smaller scale of using gestures in percussion, (and skipping past the years and years of societal evolutions that led to this) is the development of the moeller stroke. This stroke allows the percussionist to add a gesture of fluidity and efficiency to their playing, which is slowly becoming integrated into the lives of most percussionists.

Without even getting into the technology of the drum itself and how that has changed since we developed from animals hitting drums from war or mates, the technology of the gesture, although it is still being used for a lot of the same reasons, has developed to a level of nuance through the progression of different art forms that has greatly impacted the percussion world and will continue to do so.