Where does this fascination for the harmonization come from ?
A lot of musicians nowadays post arrangements of anything spoken, sung, whether it is spectacular, like Obama 's speech, or funny and cheap, like the example of Jones Big Ass Truck rental.
What is the source of this attraction, and of this interest ?
First one must say that the technic is not new: already in the seventies, and early eighties, artists like Zappa have been interested in the music of the speech, and reinforced it by simple doubling :
Then the next step in elaborating on spoken voice introduced into music was to add an harmonization, by Steve Reich, for instance:
Here the samples of the voices are very short, and the music is more important than the quantity of text, of prerecorded material.
In the case of pre recorded material, like Big Ass Jones, the idea is more to give a musical environment to natural sounds, whether they are vocal, or environmental, accompanied with image. In the case of Reich, it's more a material to elaborate a classical composition.
THe fundamental idea in this doubling is the idea of melting different layers of perception and reality: one being daily, without value, with no importance: the spoken voice, even for Big Ass Jones, parody, dirtiness of signification. To give it a new value, a astonishing value, a preciousness which is far from being implied by the first material :
In the case of pre recorded material, like Big Ass Jones, the idea is more to give a musical environment to natural sounds, whether they are vocal, or environmental, accompanied with image. In the case of Reich, it's more a material to elaborate a classical composition.
THe fundamental idea in this doubling is the idea of melting different layers of perception and reality: one being daily, without value, with no importance: the spoken voice, even for Big Ass Jones, parody, dirtiness of signification. To give it a new value, a astonishing value, a preciousness which is far from being implied by the first material :
In the case of Reich, it's a bit different, since the samples are cleaner, and selected to such a degree that they could have been recorded on purpose.
The basic, the fundamental idea in this confrontation of reality and the precious world of delicate harmony (in the case of Big Jones Ass it's particularly sophisticated) is the magical idea of revealing the invisible in the visible, namely to reveal the hidden musical structure of the banal common life.
It is restauring a sort of unity which is not lost, but seems to have always been here although hidden.
It is not religious, since it doesn't imply an idea of any god or any humiliation/passivity/acceptance, it's really inside the nature of music, which is to be a magical act of revealing the secret relations between our perception and nature.
