 |
| John Adams |
Every so often music is written that is so powerful it makes your scalp tingle and your hair stand on end. Sometimes total body. Maybe it’s just my scalp, my body. I don’t know. I’d like to know if it happens to others.
Many musical pieces bring tears, but there
is something special, thrilling, about the scalp tingling. Somewhat different than
the music that elicits tears, such as the Adagietto
in Mahler’s 5th Symphony (search adagietto on youtube), or Barber’s Adagio
for Strings, or several operatic duets I could name,
or Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful.
Very few pieces do the scalp tingle thing. A full body cringe of pleasure
is close to the scalp tingling, but slightly different, more cerebral. In jazz, several tunes by Weather Report make
me cringe; a high-register attack by Wayne Shorter on his soprano; a high
piercing note by Miles Davis in Right Off
from the Jack Johnson album, or the long tones in Fast Track from We Want Miles. Pleasure cringes for sure, but not the eerie magical scalp tingle.
For me recently, renowned
composer John Adams’s minimalistic piece from the 1980s called Shaker Loops (sadly I only recently
discovered the piece) is the one with the most precise effect. It consistently happens
during the third movement, about twenty-two minutes in, all strings rising in
tension and tempo until a chord is struck repeatedly by all the players, slow
at first and then faster and faster repetitions that approach a solid chord,
then bang! onto a new chord more powerful than the first, again slow at first
and accelerating to a final new chord,
more complex and powerful than the prior two, followed by a fade, and the
tingling stops.
May 6, 2015
