Spencer Klaw Kennedy

“I Dreamt That You Drowned,” a hybrid of traditional percussion, contemporary classical, indie folk, and raw sound.

A sprawling new album, I Dreamt That You Drowned originated in large part as a response to the confinement of techniques used in classical music. The walls that we place around different genres do not allow them to learn from each other. Featuring twelve-tone composition, extensive quotations, serialist production ideas, text taken from Delany, Joyce, graffiti, and improvisation, and a massive array of percussion instruments, the album is nonetheless a work of “popular” music. The work is both an exploration of what makes popular music, and hopefully a step to break down that barrier that we have placed around genres.

BONUS: Some Thoughts!

This project has been in my mind for half a decade. I have always felt as though classical music needed to learn from other genres, and other genres should learn from it, but I had no idea how that could be achieved until this project came to fruition. It is both an acceptance of and rejection of serialism as a notion. I have personally always felt that classical music was the absolute worst place for serial music to start; to position it as the inheritor of the western tradition of classical music greatly limited its possibilities for interplay with other kinds of music. Here, it has been used and hidden on multiple levels. The notes, tempi, instrumentation, and production were somewhat serialized at the beginning, though as the project went on and my natural musical instincts took over, the serial nature became more and more obscure. Ultimately, it sounds nothing like a serial work at all, but the serial method lent it a unique framework, something that is much easier in pop than classical. I believe that, in classical music, serialism is dead, and I just as firmly believe that if it rises again, it will rise outside of classical – in electronic and independent music. Other techniques usually not found in pop music – Balinese scales, microtones, spoken word – were also incorporated.

Everything was written out as sheet music before recording, which allowed for a far greater level of structure than one is typically afforded. It also allowed for a number of fun mini-themes and connections throughout; to give one example, Landscape and Cityscape are two works that position antique instruments (gamelan and harpsichord) against modern ones (vibraphone and synth), giving both extremely unique timbres, while the extremely offset rhythms of Cityscape contrast with the smooth, melodic lines of Landscape, forming a tone poem of sorts for the two diametrically opposed environments. This was also a learning experience; I learned many harsh truths (such as, one should have the same vocal recording setup for the whole process, so that they all sound the same.)