Modern Art Music

Now I’m not the biggest fan of any kind of modern art as I usually spend about five minutes in a modern-art museum looking at a splash of paint on a white canvas and the only thing I want to do is take an ice-pick and shove it in my eye-sockets. Maybe I’m not sophisticated or artsy or anything enough but I am definitely sane enough to realize that most modern art should stay hidden far away.

Well yesterday I was invited to see some a Modern Music composer. Thinking this could be interesting/terrible; I bite my lower lip and decide ‘how bad could it be’. My biggest issue going into this was that I was missing out on some fashion show where the girls are built to race.

I sit down at the Miller theatre in NYC to watch new composer Jefferson Friedman showcase his ‘talents’ through 2 ½ hours of Righetti madness. I can’t sit still in am movie theatre for 20 minutes before I start fidgeting and moving around, imagine me at some classical music concert!!!

Well to call it classical music isn’t really fair… I will try to explain these four arrangements but I can best describe it as Lou Reed’s Metal-Machine Music meets Dream Theatre meets the Philharmonic.

The first act was basically a combination Eddie Van Halen on saxophone, some dude one the drums who would scream in German though a microphone, you know really fast and manic. To call this music is doing a disservice to anybody who has ever put notes to paper; it was like a jack-hammer for 30 straight minutes with a guy who sounds like a german torturer screaming over it. I guess i'm not sophisticated enough for this either because there was nothing musical about it. I felt like poking my ears with an ice-pick through most of this.

The second piece was an arrangement for string quartet which I can best describe it as the sound of a swarm of bees. These guys played so fast that they were literally busting their bows throughout the concert, there was horse hair everywhere. I felt like taking the ice-pick and trying to swat away the bees

After an intermission where they did not serve nearly enough alcohol, they went back to the string quartet which for this piece was actually pretty darn good because the composer decided to stick with melodies, harmonies and themes. I took the ice-pick and tried to see if there was a bar who would exchange it for a Coors Lite.

The fourth piece can best only be described as brutal. Some dude (Craig Wedren from the rock band Shudder To Think) backed up by a group of hippy kids on strings, piano, drums, flute and clarinet singing three songs which sounded like they belonged as the last song to a movie like Narnia except a bit more pompous and a lot less good. I wanted to take the ice-pick and shove it in my groin

The worst thing is that as I’m deciding whether taking the ice-pick out of my groin might be more or less painful than leaving it in, I get a bunch of text messages from my buddies at this fashion-show who bombarding me stuff like

“the chicks are so hot and the beers are so cold”,

“you are really missing out, some chick just bent over right in front of me”

“how’s the concert..:snicker:”