Fallout (final section)

[ted]

Staircases in a recurring dream ? The ineluctable, cyclic tyranny of escape and capture ? The identity of freedom and restraint ? The apotheosis of McGoohan's "Prisoner" ? Where am I ? Who is Number One ?

[quantum]

You could be a fruit on a tree, the dichotomy of staying on and growing or being picked off and enjoyed as food.  Maybe you are inside one of M.C. Eschers artworks. 

Heard some polytonality in there, is it representative of the contrasting states?  Towards the end things became more rhythmically vigorous.  I like the section starting at 12:59.

I've listened to this a number of times and have got no idea where you are, but I do enjoy the music inspired by the vision.

[ted]

Thanks for listening in such depth, Neil. Come to think of it I like that section too, and other similar sections. I have always been fascinated by rhythmic transformations. Everybody talks a lot about harmonic transitions, i.e. chord sequences, but discussions on their rhythmic equivalent hardly exist. I conjecture that this is because rhythm is a continuous feature with respect to time and therefore cannot be easily analysed in discrete fashion as note combinations can; of course I don't actually know.

I really do have a recurring dream about rather sinister staircases leading nowhere in a building I am trying to get out of. Then at some point I recognise I am dreaming and control events by simply altering the physical properties to suit myself, making walls disappear and so on. I "fall out" of my own predicament. "Fallout" is also the title of the infamous final episode of "The Prisoner", the screening of which led to McGoohan and his family going into exile because of death threats; silly but apparently true. The viewing public in the sixties, by and large, had no conception of abstract allegory. Even here in New Zealand the reception was hostile and I was just about the only person I know who thought McGoohan's series marvellous.

You are right about the polytonality, but with me that is a just a special example of a more general precept much broader than music. it is easier to deal with a complicated entity by seeing it as a combination of two or more simpler entities, if such is possible. Thus, for instance, in piano playing a ninth chord can be thought of as a major in the left hand against a minor a fifth above in the right. Similarly playing in, say, Eb major in the left and F# minor in the right will contain most of the "blue" subsets without conscious thought of voicings. Fluent playing of many common piano sounds is highly dependent on how we think about them. Unfortunately, at least as I see it, many traditional ways of viewing musical elements are supremely efficient roadblocks to spontaneous creation. Again I have grasped the nettle and await the arrival of the piano police !