Genre : Piano, Instrumental
Origin : United States
Official site : > - here - <
This review starts out with an informational block quoted from the official site linked above.
You may not know the name Peter Calandra, but chances are you’ve heard his music. The New York City-based composer and keyboard player has scored 40 films, written over 2000 compositions for television broadcast, including 37 theme packages, and performed as a musician in the Broadway productions of Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, The Phantom Of The Opera, The Lion King, and Little Shop Of Horrors. Parallel to this, Calandra has released three albums of imaginative and lyrical instrumental music encompassing jazz, contemporary jazz, classical, and refined pop.
“I’ve always heard music in my head—there is like a radio in there playing new music all the time,” says Calandra. Read on to know more.
The corresponding musical biography does continue on at the official site, and reading it while listening to Ashokan Memories is the perfect combination to thoroughly familiarize yourself with the favorite modal settings and harmonic piano rhetorics of industry veteran Peter Calandra. The music is deeply casual, -oxymoron? - airy, unrestrained and non-consequential. This might sound as a harsh word, whereas this exactly what makes the effort valuable. It actually is quite hard and challenging to deliver neutral/non-consequential instrumental music that still sounds convincing, and still would be suitable to musically narrate a TV program displaying a production conveyor belt of cherry jams, or children preparing for a mountain trip in the WW2 era.
As such, you can either immerse yourself into this music in a curious and deliberately supra-submissive attempt to reach out for the images the music momentarily throws your way - the LP gives you audio stimuli that is ultra-compatible with silent movies - or, you can cast this shape and form of fragile music away as you would do with cigarette smoke, and continue at every and any given point of the whole fabric at a later time, and you won't be missing out on a single thing of peaking relevance. There is no such thing on display, move alooong! Such freely spirited and non-consequential - see above - is the content, indeed. It really is of no particular rigor or notable structure. In fact, Peter Calandra is the grandmaster of how to escape compositional structure Ninja-style while impressively leaving you with the impression that something relevant must surely have happened in the process while you looked the other way. This is the thing - you always look the other way with this music, because it BEGS you to do so. It is "just" neutrally reflective-, highly elusive piano music that is satisfied with the act of revolving around its own axis, and finding delight and respite in the fact that it reigns free of the concept of having to find/promise a place it must reach/hurry to.
With a program time that offers an impertinently hot headed compliment to the 1 hour mark, the album could be accused of overstaying its welcome, whereas, in reality, this point of evasion-then-no return will strike you at minute 2 or will not warrant a glimpse towards the direction of your soul at all. Peter Calandra's effort reflects considerable bravery and a respectable level of commitment he must have regarding the efficiency of this style of music, - a style he is grandmaster of, no doubt - as the "average music listener" - a very bad position to be in - won't be able to endure these casual modal fascinations for an hour, this much is for sure. As such, Peter Calandra is the elusive composer who dares to float restrained piano notes around all those inflated egos who remain faithful to the inertia of their own convictions and assumed taste-systems, and the effect is exactly that - elusive notes floating around for an hour, because they can.
Check out Peter Calandra at his official site - > here.
GyZ at Bandcamp.
If you want, check out my music
and / or
Buy me beer.
No comments:
Post a Comment