And just as poetry's subject is life in all its manifestations, so it exacts from the reader an equal attention to the human gift of language - meaning, tone, overtone, music, pattern, memorability, the power to move and delight.
Electric guitars (played by Christopher Walla, who also produced the album, and Mr. Gibbard) and bass (Nicholas Harmer) are no longer the automatic choice to assemble the music's patterns.
In Zimbabwe, traditional Shona music uses patterns plinked on thumb pianos; guitarists started picking them and plugged them in to create Zimbabwean rock, chimurenga, that maintains the complex pointillism of the old songs.
In Le Sacre, chords appear, as they often do in Debussy, purely for their colouristic value, related to each other only by virtue of the rhythmic insistence in the music's patterns.
Whether designed to pray for longevity or for a rich harvest or to ward off disease and evil, the rituals of impersonation of supernatural beings through masks and costumes and the repetition of rhythmic music and patterns of movement perform the function of linking humans to the spiritual world beyond.
MediaUnbound also takes into consideration global music preference patterns across P2P networks, Web radio, blogs, and other MediaUnbound music customers.
Did the complexity of music cause patterns of cortical firing in the brain similar to those associated with solving spatial puzzles?
I was drawn to the music, culture, patterns, art -- anything coming from that part of the world.
In pop music, rhythmic patterns and bass lines are essentially common property, as my colleague and pop music critic Randall Roberts noted after this week's verdict.
