Saturday, October 27, 2018

A Review of the Concert Lost Highway Suite


After listening to the concert, the Lost Highway Suite, it haunted me for days. I couldn't forget the roar of the performer in the far behind, the moment that the cello performer lied down his cello and put on the electric guitar and the atonal but somehow intriguing sound performed by the orchestra.

At the beginning of the concert, it gave me a kind of grisly feeling. The suite of the orchestra seemed that they were going on their own way – the sound that were made by the instruments gave me a feeling that they were sometimes enemies on a battlefield that tried to kill each other, sometimes they were like a group of explorers walking in a haunted house. And the man’s roar just made things worse-it gave me a feeling not only horror but also a kind of torturing. My mind tried to escape from the situation that was trying to bring me back to every horror film that I had watched.

But as I adjust to the sound and slowly adapt to the concert, interesting sounds started to catch my attention. Sometimes there was a period of sound that sounds like the quick going-through car in the morning, along with the noise of the city. It brought me back to the dawn in my home town-the waking up of a busy city on a foggy day. Like I was standing on the middle of an overpass, listening to the sound of the factories located in the far countryside that just started working, watching one or two cars dashing through the fog and leaving the smell of gas, and enjoy the train passing through rarely, leaving the sound of the horn. But sometimes there were harmonic tonal parts, that brought me to the regular concert that I had been to and gave me a peaceful feeling.

The changing of sound is interesting. The discordant feeling of all the sound still existed, but when diving deeply into the sound, the multiple interesting combination started to show up. It began to transform to a dream-like concert. Dreams could be all kinds, so did the concert. When it came to the grisly part, it brought me to the horror films. When it sometimes went into harmonic parts, it brought me into the harmonic concert, or brought me to the traditional dancing party where everyone danced with the melodious music. But when it came to the part that sounded irregular, it brought me back to real life, enjoying the sound around me every day.  The dream-like experience and the experience of jumping back and forward between dream and reality is fascinating, and it stayed in my head for days.

Also, there were astonishing moments, too. The most surprising moment was the man’s roar-I didn’t expect that on a concert that was performed by orchestra, people’s voice would appear. The other astonishing moment for me is when the cello performer put down the cello and picked up the electric guitar. It was like a time machine, blurring the line between traditional orchestra and the modern music.

2 comments:

  1. I definitely agree with the grisly feeling, the beginning of the performance really impresses me, since I never listened to this kind of performance in the concert room before, and your metaphors about the meanings inside the music are quite appropriate. I also include the discordant feeling of the sound in my review, since the style of playing during the performance changed several times, and I think it is related to the "story" the performance want to show to the audiences. The yelling is quite interesting, and I was spooked by the sudden human voice that appears during the performance since I never thought that a human roar would appear in a concert performance.

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  2. I like your analogies and how you connected the sounds you heard and the feelings they created in you to your own experiences. The way you described the types of sounds you were listening to is so vivid that I can almost hear them myself. I wish I had gone to see this concert myself since it seemed to have such a profound impact on its audience.

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