The Fredösphere

"Try googling Britney Spears intellectual rigor and see how many hits you get."  Our conversation ended with this sentence, but it began--last night, in our living room--with me telling the Wifeösphere about Hexachordal, a rising internet meme and renaissance Brit.  Youtube pointed me to Tom Milsom (his real name) a few months ago; yesterday, aworks reminded me of his existence, and informed me of his remarkable awareness of 20th classical music history, via this video:



Notice Milsom's suggested starting points into the avant garde maze:  Cage, Berio, Stockhausen, Berg, Schoenberg.  Not the advice I'd give to neophytes, for personal or pragmatic reasons, but hey, you've got to be glad a kid like this is paying that much attention.  Besides his youth, his astonishing skill at writing and performing pop tunes seems an improbable trait to combine with geeking out on 12 tone and musique concréte techniques.  Here's him singing Indigo:



Very good, don't you think?  I confess to multi-multiple listenings yesterday afternoon.  I haven't overdosed on a song like that since I discovered Polyphonic Spree.  I would like to see Milsom rework the 2-voice counterpoint during the 7th inning stretch, but otherwise, it's got a great beat and you can read your thesaurus to it.  (Yes, it's mostly a list.  You see Milsom use that approach in other songs to less effect, but with Indigo he seems to have struck goldenrod. And anyway, Walt Whitman wrote a lot of lists and nobody complains.)

Pop tune talent; appealing looks and non-threatening affect; and some intellectual chops in the music theory department:  a triple threat.  Jupiter is aligned with Mars.  A rare, magical combination.  Hoo boy, do I hate him.

Labels: Composer, VideoClip