Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Shorty #1: Hair

Quoth Daniel, upon reading my last post, "wow, that was long!"

Okay, fine. ^__^ Today you get three shorties.

There are certain pieces of art that demarcate a "before and after;" there was a moment, after all, before I heard Bernstein's Candide or saw Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood or opened the Mahabharata.

And there was a time before I ever heard the soundtrack to Hair.

(Ennis, don't laugh!)

I may be the only person of my generation currently rocking out to the 1960s American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, but it's so intricate and tricksy and travels just along the edge of harmonic predictability.

Here's a clip of that old favorite "Age of Aquarius." Note how the composer creates tension by combining a syncopated bass line against a rapid, arrythmic electric guitar against an almost-behind-the-beat hi-hat. (It's a little fuzzy in the clip and sounds much better on my own sound system.)

Also yay Twyla Tharp.

It also occurs to me that I am, at the moment, surrounded by members of the Age of Aquarius. (No, not you guys... the people in the cubes next to me.) And I wonder, just a bit.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I'm not *that* old. That was before I was born, although, yes, I heard the soundtrack early. Well, I heard the major singles early, had to wait to hear the whole thing until later, and didn't see it staged until college.

Blue said...

My goodness, you caught the post even before I had a chance to revise it!

And it was all mismashed up, too!

Ah, well.

Blue said...

That is to say I always go back and tweak sentences, etc. after the first posting, after I see what it looks like in the layout and what I've forgotten to add.

And I didn't think that you would laugh because of any kind of age, but because of my complete ignorance to this musical before now. ^__^