WIP: Nostalgia Ideas

At this point, most of my thoughts about this series center around using popular songs from the post-WWI era as source material. Although I'm aware of certain works in the classical/Western Art Music/Folk traditions that could be relevant (e.g. Recuerdos de la Alhambra), I think that manipulating modern songs using a combination of modern harmonic/rhythmic techniques (and potentially technologies) would produce the best results.

As I've been researching the topic I've started to think in terms of hip-hop/electronic music. Instead of "collage" or "polymeter", terms like "mash-up" and "remix" have consistently surfaced. However, I'm skeptical that these techniques can be applied to composition that doesn't take advantage of sampling technologies. If, for no other reason, that the unique timbre of a recorded performance can't be reliably recreated without the sample itself. Yet I still wonder if it's possible to tap into the musical developments of the past 30 years without using the technology that enabled them.

So, some ideas...

1. Recompose popular songs using modern harmonic/rhythmic techniques such as matrix operations
   
2. Using sections of disparate songs to create a pastiche
3. Layering different voices from disparate songs a la Ives or Zorn
   
4. Apply the rhythms of one song to the melodic/harmonic voices of another

Of course, all of these ideas could be applied to older, and possibly more importantly, public domain material. During this time I've also begun to explore my own culture through the music of my distant ancestors, and the idea of "mashing up" the folk melodies of Norway and Scotland with modern popular song is interesting. However, I'm not sure that it's possible to do this without the results sounding like a Wal-Mart "Jazz Loon" sampler.

WIP: Nostalgia quotes

• It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back.  -Bill Vaughn
• Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:  you find the present tense, but the past perfect!  -Owens Lee Pomeroy
• Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.  -Doug Larson
• Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.  -Will Rogers
• True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories... but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted déjà vu. -Florence E. King
  
• Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. -Albert Camus
• It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.  -Carson McCullers
• A society that has made nostalgia a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.  -Christopher Lasch
• It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. -Frank Zappa
• Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves? -Julio Cortazar
• In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by an aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. -Milan Kundera
• Backward turn backward o time in your flight Make me a child again just for tonight... -Elizabeth Akers Allen
• Later, it would occur to me it's the emptiness we mistakenly call innocence. -Sol Luckman
• When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. -Albert Camus
  

WIP: More on Nostalgia

Currently reading an article, by Linda Hutcheon entitled "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern".

Interesting fact, nostalgia was a term coined in 1688 by a 19-year old Swiss student in his medical dissertation. Who would have thought that what is now used as a marketing ploy was once a considered a medical condition...