And what a face.

Wow. And this is a pure webcast.

Notice who is playing Ma and Pa Rogers,

Teaser:

This link should embed properly and work better.

This is an update, and I’ve got to say, it seems to work reasonably well. I think this might be just the sort of thing I need to make quick blog entries. I’ll continue to review it as I do some more wotk with it.

Ed Driscoll pointed this out. It’s the title and end-credits music from the original Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three, and it’s an example of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique.  This is sometimes called serialism but the serialists do lots of other weird stuff that I don’t hear in this.

Schoenberg’s idea was to get away from the usual notions of Western music. Instead of picking a tonal chord and all, you take any chromatic scale, and pick one of the 12! (479,001,600) permutations of the 12 tones in that chromatic scale, and base the music on that, applying mathematical operations on that sequence (which is called a tone-row) to built the music.

A lot of times, that just doesn’t work, because what a lot of serialists are trying to do is break away from the constraints of music. The result is a bunch of noises that just don’t work very well as music.

Sometimes it does.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

(Remember the video dance on treadmills? Same guys.)