First day of class -- McCartney

Before today I was doing a bad job of describing what this class was to people. "It's called music and language... we are reading about billie holliday, it should be really cool." I am pleased to be writing about music, creatively and critically.

Today in class we listened to Paul McCartney's new album. The introduction sounded like tuning instruments with a rhythm behind it, it sounded chaotic. Then the music thinned out and there was a dialogue between the low strings and the drum and slowly built back up with more instrumentation and more layers. The instruments did not have a big range of notes used, it was not very melodic or lyrical, but instead, pressing and marching forward without changing. it sounded disjointed with jolting rhythms.

perhaps listening to the rest of the song would have allowed it time to become more melodically interesting, but i thought mccartney's limited understanding of music theory was really apparent in the lack of diversity in the string parts. It wasn't close to the caliber of composers we compared him to in class, stravinsky's rite of spring and beethovens ninth symphony, but it was an interesting atmospheric kind of music to listen to.