Steve Reich – PENNdulum Music

 

That was just horrible. I don’t understand how this can be called music, because these are just horrific sounds. A pain in my ears. But I guess anything that consists of sounds can be called music. This, however, looked more like an experiment to me. From the bystanders’ first response it seems they weren’t sure it would work the way they expected it to, but it did.

They set up four microphones hanging upside down next to four speakers to capture the feedback sounds. Then they simultaneously dropped all microphones in an opposite pendulum motion, which made them swing by the speakers on the ground. Whenever that happened, there was some feedback noises, which often were high pitched sounds that rang in my ears.

Normally I like to listen to the pieces several times to get a better listen to them, but this one I could barely listen to once. I kept checking when it would be over because my ears started to hurt from the high pitch noise.

I was very surprised by the positive responses of the bystanders. They really seemed to enjoy it and were wowed by the effect. One guy even started grooving at some point. But I could not discover a rhythm, nor find pleasure in any of it. I was just glad when they finally pulled the plugs, the silence was heavenly.

I did notice towards the end that some people were also starting to cover their ears, seems like I was not the only one who didn’t fully enjoy it. And yet again, I have no idea how someone can get this thought and be like: Oh yeah, let’s try and make everybody’s ears bleed. It will be fun!

Reich sure had some weird ideas.