Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Aug. 13 2007, 14:18 |
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Quote (north star @ Aug. 13 2007, 17:46) | he wont get it by sticking those bl**dy seven notes in YET AGAIN.... |
Well they're not the same seven notes...so end of argument :>
The Tubular Bells opening riff is - if I've counted correctly - 30 notes (of course they aren't 30 different notes, the same one is played more than once, but it's a full 30 notes until the sequence repeats completely). If you purely count the notes of the scale used, it comes to 6 if I'm not mistaken, and if Mike wasn't allowed to use the same scale more than once in his work, then I suspect he'd have given up long ago...
Yes, it's a similar pattern. So was the opening to Amarok, yet I've never heard anyone complain about that one...the degree of similarity is roughly the same, I'd say. The theme develops in quite a different way, to my ears, and the pattern moves around a lot more. I dare say it sounds more complex than Tubular Bells to me.
Still...unless you're a partner or shareholder in Oldfield Music Ltd, I'd suggest not worrying about how Mike is seen by the press and the general public. That's his problem to deal with. How he's seen by the public doesn't change the music (though I'm of course aware that public perception can guide an artist in a certain direction) - it affects only the sales, and I thought most fans felt that Mike shouldn't be bothered by how much money he's making. Has it never occurred to the nay sayers out there that Mike might actually like the music he's making? Composers do have motifs and sequences that they like, little patterns, certain turnarounds, chords, favourite cadences, structures and all the rest...those tend to come out most when music is written 'from the heart'. That inevitably results in certain parts of certain works sounding similar. I've heard it with Bach, I've heard it with Beethoven, I've heard it with Elgar, with Pete Townshend, Paul McCartney and Jean Michel Jarre. It's not just confined to music either - look at all the pictures of sunflowers that Van Gough painted, or the number of times themes which recur in the paintings of Dalí and Magritte.
Of course, posting this is probably doing about as much good as urinating in a hurricane...trolls seem to prefer ignorance. Still, at least I can say I tried.
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