Now this video is in response to a comment
by 'Kitchen Sink Muses Art' about our Debussy video.
Kitchen Sink Muses Art says:
"Fascinating that you use the word 'psychedelic'!"
"I've been using classical music to explore my mind"
"in the same way that people might use acid or mushrooms for a long while now"
"Do you recommend anyone who would take me on a trip?"
This video does not advocate psychedelic drugs
but what we ARE prescribing is the best cocktail for psychedelic classical music
to get you a real high.
The first question we have to ask is -
what is psychedelic music?
Psychedelic music we understand as a style of rock music that emerges in the 1960s
typified by space-age sounds
heavily influenced by Eastern roots
like India raga
the drones we find in Asiatic music.
Psychedelic drugs are of course a large part of this;
it is about realising in music the altered states of consciousness
that one can achieve whilst intoxicated.
So psychedelic music we might understand as being distorted
featuring surreal, bright colours
whacky soundscapes.
But psychedelia is nothing new - at least in substance.
British garage band The Yardbirds
which famously included Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin
worshipped Stravinsky.
And Procol Harum's psych classic 'A Whiter Shade of Pale'
is often said to be inspired by JS Bach.
Our Debussy video explained how the composer drew on these psychedelic influences
to free classical music from its Germanic roots.
We all know that The Beatles went to Rishikesh
and that George Harrison was inspired by Ravi Shankar's sitar music
and incorporated that into the psych sound of The Beatles' rock and pop music.
But Debussy did exactly the same.
In 1889, when he was in Paris, he heard an Indonesian gamelan band playing:
that was his Ravi Shankar.
He took the moods from what he heard of that gamelan band playing.
He imported their pentatonic scales - the five
notes common to all musical systems across the world.
And he layered all these factors together
to create a really unresolved, blurry,
fuzzy harmony of a piece that we hear in Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faun.
So the first prescription I would give to Kitchen Sink Muses Art
is many of Debussy's works from the early 1900s
which really reflect this psychedelic sound he is looking for.
Another one of our videos is on Holst's The Planets.
This also arguably taps into this psychedelic language -
more than a few prog rocks I would argue have been inspired by Neptune's ghostly sounds.
We are going to talk about Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique in
our next video so I am going to leave the content of that
but it will become obvious that that is a psychedelic-feeling piece.
But two more prescriptions I may give for Kitchen Sink Muses Art are Scriabin's works -
a terribly misunderstood composer and something of an outsider,
who I would argue still doesn't get much fair appreciation outside of the classical music world.
And if he really wants to go all hippie-dippy,
I recommend that Kitchen Sink Muses Art sits in a
nice room full of rugged, textured carpets and beanbags
and he spaces out to some hypnotic drone music
like Terry Riley's In C or Steve Reich's drumming music -
some of the great Minimalist masters like Philip Glass.
Those are our prescriptions to Kitchen Sink Muses Art,
and I would recommend that to anyone who wants a healthier way to reach their favoured high!