Dead Children and Don Preston

Hello blogging world!

Yesterday, as a part of my orchestra grade, my class, which consists of four people, was invited forced to participate in a performance with Don Preston, who is a member of the band The Grandmothers (they’re quite old). If you don’t know who he is(don’t worry, I didn’t know either), Here is a video for anyone who doesn't know who he is:

 One of the songs that we played was titled Dead Children. Creepy, right? Supposedly he wrote the song at the time when there were a lot of shootings, which resulted in a lot of innocent peoples’ deaths, including many children. He wrote this piece out of anger at the murderers. The song is basically a bunch of random sharps and flats that are played slowly, and then for improve, everyone first played a bunch of random notes really slowly, and then for cue two, a bunch of random notes as fast as possible. It sounded really weird, like music from a horror film. 

The second piece that my orchestra class participated in was a piece called A Jovian Life. There was no score, only a story written out on a page of paper. A person would read a part of the story, then we would play what we feel. We hadn’t practiced it before, so it was really strange to improvise based off of words. For most of the “song” we just ended up sitting there wondering if we were supposed to be playing or not, since our orchestra teacher wasn’t cueing us in, he was too into the improve. Overall, it was a really interesting experience, definitely one of those moments to add to the most strange moments of my life list. Only a few faculty members and students showed up total, which was disappointing for my orchestra teacher, but a relief for us :)

Have you ever heard of Don Preston or The Grandmothers? Do you know any other strange "improvisational" artists? Comment below :)