Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Composer's Lounge What would be a musical torture chamber for you?

So, a pretty large proportion of the piano repertoire then?

Of course you are entitled to your opinion but how can Beethoven be a musical torture chamber? What is it that you don't like about his music? Or Chopins?

(those are all among my favorite composers)

I was going to say . . . if those composers are torture for you, you are in trouble going into a music program.

(There's always a sarcastic one in the crowd )

-Hope your prof's torture you by assigning music from your favorite composers. Better yet hope they torture you by assigning anything and everything but the music by your favorite composers .

P.S. - Had pizza for supper minus stiff drinks (I don't drink ).

Another musical torture chamber - listening to piano students play "Heart and Soul" - for an eternity.

Having to listen to one of those fake clock chimes adinfinitum - those battery driven ones that sound so completely, unbelievably hokey.

Having to sit in my car and listen to the windshield wipers scrape across the windshield. They make a LOUD RUBBER SOUNDING scraping noise. (Honestly, EVERYTHING about my car is NOISY. It makes that high pitched whiny noise Jeeps make when I back the car up. The fan for the heater HUMS at some ungodly pitch. There is a LOW PITCHED VACUUM NOISE that hurts my ears when I close the doors. It has METALLIC BRAKE PADS that make an UNGODLY SCREETCHING NOISE when it is humid out or raining. There's some kind of whistling noise something under the hood makees. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH.

And have I mentioned how I reacted to the NEW STOVE we bought? Any of you buying a new stove, if the touch control pad is on the FRONT of your stove, PREPARE THYSELF. An audible FAN turns on when you turn the OVEN on. JUST WHAT I NEED. MORE NOISE IN THE KITCHEN. I've gotten used to it now. There is no alternative BTW for those of us wanting the knobs on the front of the stove. We must now live with TA-DUM...............THE FAN IN THE KITCHEN.



Jeanne W

clap, clap, clap, clap, clap - !

I second all those things. I haven't had the oven experience but have first hand experience with all the others. I especially love the clock example. A relative gave us one of those fake chiming clocks for a gift once. My husband loved it and wouldn't part with it and thought I was crazy for being annoyed with it. It finally broke - how unfortunate .

Add to your list the perpetual sound in the dryer from snaps on jeans, overall clasps, and zippers clanging - "clank, clank, clank, clank . . . "

Get the dryer, the dishwasher, the oven fan, and the furnace going and turn up the t.v. to be heard over everything and you have your own little household orchestra.

Oh and we added a gas fireplace a few years back which creates a much more "pleasing" constant hissing sound as opposed to the "annoying" crackle of a real wood fireplace.

Having to listen to bad karaoke without a GONG OR MANY Stiff Drinks (anyone remember the gong show?)

A church choir where the average age is 90 and the squeal of their hearing aids is in a different key than the music.

Those Gameboy game background ditties repeatedly
Especially the Mario Brothers one

Anything Rap-ish or screaming heavy metal

The "This is a test of the emergency broadcasting network" annoying Tones & Beeps

Gelineau (aka Jelly Nose) Psalms

Speaker Buzz or the Hamster's wheel

FOR ETERNITY

1. A room in which the same thing were played over and over, exactly the same way, without end, for eternity.

2. A room in which no music played.

I rank #2 as #2 because I would take it over #1. I can make up my own music in room #2, but in room #1, I would find that to be more difficult.

Listening to an almost life sized hip swivelling red bellied Santa/Elvis hybrid automaton wheezing out Christmas carols for eternity. They had one in CVS on the prescription counter.

1) Being stuck in an elevator that plays nothing but musak, for eternity.
2) Being stuck in a room with, ummm... a certain kind of karaoke, for eternity (for what kind, see http://www.wingtunes.com/public/songs.aspx )
3) Being stuck in a shopping centre during the last shopping week before Christmas, with all the intensified christmas jingles being played non-stop to encourage shoppers to hurry up and make room for more shoppers, stuck in a timeloop, that just keeps going back to the start of that week, for eternity.
4) Being stuck in a room where pieces all the theory professors wrote were being played non-stop, for eternity (theory teachers don't write good compositions!)
5) Being stuck at the country music awards, for eternity. (shudder!)
6) Being stuck at a middle-school battle of the bands, for eternity.
7) Having to sing a medley of the stupidest Children's Songs for choir, for eternity (THIS ONE IS ACTUALLY TRUE! AGHHH, well, except for the "for eternity" part, thank god)
8) Having to listen to a TV or radio station of non-stop advertisement jingles, really loudly, for eternity.
9) Having to sing choral vocal warmup excersizes, for eternity.
10) And the ULTIMATE, having to listen to a compilation of all the most dissonant, most atonal, and most loud pieces ever written, for eternity.

My musical torture would be being locked in a room with a stereo that won't shut off, only playing Elliot Carter, Messaien, or Schoenberg.

I would literally kill myself.

I went to a performance of the Juilliard String Quartet once, and they played a string quartet by Elliot Carter. It's a form of "musical journalism," and the point of this particular work was to describe the sounds of an orchestra warming up. So the four players were playing completely random stuff, some scales, some random excerpts, tuning, etc. Everynow and then, one guy would be playing something and the others would tag along and play the same thing, and then they'd all break up and play random stuff again....

Not very enjoyable music, IMO.

I saw this program that studies music on TV the other day and they showed this trick where your mind is illuded into thinking that a note is played in a pitch that's constantly increasing, while in fact the pitch was merely going in circles. I don't know how this worked but my point is that you got the exact same feeling in your stomach as if someone was playing an eternal ascending chromatic scale.

NOW, for a moment this may seem cool and interesting, but believe me after about an hour of this you would undoubtably be on your knees, beginning to be put out of your misery.

Sitting in a white room with huge bose earphones (built so I couldn't take them off) playing heavy metal as loud as possible for all eternity. I think my head would explode after 3 hours though.

The T

Pop, half of them are untalented, those that are talented rarely sing about anything worthwhile, and some of them can't even perform live so they have to mime, i believe alot of pop is a desecration to music and rapes something so beautiful.

Then again alot of people would say alot about rock which i listen to alot of, Heavy metal, Metal, and rock in general... i just feel theres alot more to identify with in rock.. pain etc... you can have happy upbeat rock songs and then down right depressing rock songs. Pop fails here it always seems to be upbeat and never really comes from the heart or soul it just seems so fake... so false. When a song moves you to the very core of your soul... when it sends shivers down your spine... thats when you have a brilliant song.

By music being raped by the pop scene i mean things like the crazy frog tune, the cheeky girls, the cha cha slide, 'the streets', the black eyed peas, and lets not forget that person who sang "my neck, my back lick my *censored* and whatever else it was" not an exact quote but it got millions of listeners.... oh and the JCB song... if i could kill just one person... it'd be the creator of the JCB song

I agree with all of the above! (the last paragraph in particular illustrates the quallity of music dominating our charts. If anybody hasnt heard any of the examples above, I would recommend that you.......DONT BOTHER!!!

being forced to play a song that is to hard for me to play for days in front of people who hate it and hate me for playing it.

Something has gone wrong when a composer decides that the process is more important than the result.

Pop doesn't upset me. At least it's generally served up in quite short chunks :-)

I agree with both points. Pop music is something that can be related to by millions. You don't have to listen to it. Neither do you have to listen to the super modern stuff. I generally don't when it sounds too random.

As for the OP, perhaps you've seen the Farside cartoon where the devil is showing a maestro into a room full of accordion players. The caption, "This way maestro."

"There ain't no coda" :-)

The biggest musical torture I could think of right now would be having to listen to that awful "Friday" song on repeat.