And as a tonic to tonight's pop-jazz, it's the crisp and weird percussion music of Edgard Varèse. Let's see -- five degrees of connection would be Cyndi Lauper to Miles Davis to Teo Macero to Edgard Varèse to Richard Strauss. Although apparently, Cyndi Lauper and Richard Strauss have already been linked, at least artistically. Regarding a performance of Strauss' Arabella:
The only clear visual reference to a specific era was an inexplicable image from the 1980s — a group of Asian waiters break-dancing on stage while Milli (the trilling Russian coloratura Olga Trifonova) sang dressed up like the pop star Cyndi Lauper in the video "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."
Back to Varèse, Paul Griffiths in the Penguin Companion to Classical Music suggests he was "an extreme radical in a radical generation" and kept pushing his modernist vision even while others were backing away.
And, Brian Sacawa mentions Ionisation as one of several early examples of extended musical technique along with another favorite of mine, Henry Cowell's The Tides of Manaunaun. (I'm always amazed at the latest Wikipedia entry for Tides compared to that modest stub I created in 2002, which comes complete with an incorrect spelling but also with a factoid, later deleted, about the SFS/Charles Ives/Grateful Dead concert).
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