Music Mosaic: Play Her Piano

The song 'Play Her Piano' by Glue is an innovative combination of historical and modern sounds. The main melody has the regality of a baroque piece, while the record scratching and digitalized drum beats slip a hip-hop rhythm between the piano strokes. 

The images I have placed with this piece only emphasize Glue's interesting dialogue between the old and the new. Glue cleverly plays the differing tones off of one another, excluding neither one nor the other, but showing that old can slip away to new. I wanted to show this interesting relationship between the past and the present in my images as well. I started by finding historical photographs, and then juxtaposing them with modern icons. The effect was startling and effective. 

I found that as I placed the images together, I discovered new and evocative meanings. Together, the images meant much more than they did on their own. As recovering blind patients met the world in a new way in 'Seeing' by Annie Dillard, I felt I had similar experiences as I encountered familiar images through a new context. Things which had only seemed two dimensional before suddenly popped into a much wider context, as they gained an element of historical dimension. In this way I think that the images are 'historically cubist'. They have the ability to show both sides of history at the same time, a sort of Photoshop Picasso. 

The images represent the music in many ways. First of all, I love that 'Play Her Piano' seems repetitive and almost glitchy, like a skipping record. I realized that history is often the same, coming back to the same places it left, just at a different time. The images I have placed together, though often very different in actuality, are emotionally linked. The trepidation and fear of college graduates relates to the uncertainty of soldiers fighting with their lives for a just cause, as the amazement at exploring the poles must have felt similar to exploring the vastness of space. The song also reminded me of a life story, beginning with a slow and simple beginning, and ending in an abrupt drone. However, as the piece seems to transform from old to new, I didn't want it to be the story of a life, but rather the bridge between lives. I placed a picture of an older woman first, passing on her history to the boy at the end, mouth open to receive it. The boy, much like us all, is taking these stories and understanding each one in the context of his modern, boyhood, world. Though we of this generation are unfamiliar what it would have been like to live in the past, we can compare it to the things that we have experienced, and are able to give our history emotional meaning.