Why metanarrative?

In the past, I have written pieces in which I tried to portray and convey a specific narrative. These failed. Either the audience is supposed to read the program notes before the piece and then recall it and recognize the ways I tried to represent it, or they are reading the programs during the piece and the music is really accompaniment to the program notes.

I have also written pieces that had more classical ideals if form as the main narrative. In other words, the narrative was that a first theme in this key is followed by a second theme in another key, or that this version of the material is followed by this manipulation of the material.

This leaves the idea of conveying a narrative theme, and allowing the audience to fill in the blanks. Metanarrative.

The Distillations set is really all about this. It is part of why I haven’t revealed what the piece “is about” in any other than a general way.

I spent most of the day updating the Mystery Cabal site. I added some new audio to Frequency Response and filled in the Credits page.

The bigger project was to create a “jukebox” page for the audio from the series.

It came out pretty good.

www.mysterycabal.com

Jukebox

This continues from an earlier thread:

http://www.brandonvaccaromusic.com/comp_blog/?p=36

Here it is:

http://www.mysterycabal.com/audio/distil.html

I have been working a recording of the “Distillation Set” for the last month or so. I have a pretty good version with the best stuff from several takes. I was talking to Lynn Baker about it on Sunday at Tatsuya’s SPMC show. I commented that I was trying to be very conscious of the narrative in patching together different versions. He laughed at me. For so long, I avoided narrative in pursuit of a different type of consciousness-changing experience in my music. As thought about it, I realized I wasn’t really working with a narrative so much as a meta-narrative. Read the rest of this entry »