W h a t A r t I s Author/Arranger: Julian Burmeister

Motive: My intention was to create an instrumental guitar song with a strange nightmare feeling which still had a touch of a dreamy beauty in it. The protagonist of What Art Is is a young man, straying hectically over the corridors of an art house - trying to find out what art is and contribute to it. While staying in the same place, the same building, he runs miles and miles, meandering on the same paths from one corner to the next, just to assure himself he did not oversee a detail of the riddle. While many people are around him in this noisy and unresting enviroment, he still feels some kind of wet, translucent curtain between him and the rest of the world. He feels a certain weight on his shoulders but his body seems to be weightless a paradox feeling. He is in a hurry on a day which never seems to end but after getting his artwork done, he falls into a peaceful, redemptive sleep. The gravity-confusion comes to an satisfying end like oxygen bubbling up in water. Heavy inspiration comes from Joe Satriani and his albums Crystal Planet(listen to Raspberry Jam Delta V, Up in the sky and With Jupiter in mind) and Strange Beautiful Music (Mind Storm) as well as Greg Kochs work on the song Zoiks. Stylistic devices: First of all, the song had to have an alienated sound which pricks the ears of the audience. I found the connection of an A minor chord with an Ab major chord to be flawless like a foreign land of wilderness. Its a mere uncommon combination which is seldomly used in pop music. The common basis of these two chords is undoubtedly the C which is also featured in the main theme (Letter A, p.2). When we regard the major/minor parallels of those two chords (Cmaj and Fmin) they are not so uncommon any more and seem to appear in every second Coldplay song... The chord line develops in letter B, p.3 to Gmin which leads to Fmaj which becomes the new key for the rest of the section. The end chord a Cmaj - leaves the listener with a question mark and is supposed to be an unexpected key change in the very end. Additional friction is brought by the 6th in the intro and in the latter main theme over the Amin chord - as well as the tone A which is repeated over the Ab chord. I wanted a rushing feeling for the song which implied a high tempo. I started out trying with 180bpm which was perfect for the tapping technique in the beginning. But everything else did not work in that tempo and so I decreased it step by step which is why I ended up by 150 bpm. Although the song still has this hasty feeling to it, I was able to give it a second layer: a dreamy and agravic one, with long notes in the various parts and a groovy half time middle section. The drums have a lot of hihat action in16ths (which I did not notate by the way) in the main theme (letter A) and on the ride (letter B) to support the hastiness. The 7/4 parts (letter C, p.3) are not designed as ear prickers but come as a flowing breeze of disorientation and not knowing where to turn to the next peaking in the 3/8 zigzags in letter H, p.7. Imagine the protagonist jumping from one urgent topic to another at a glance. The bass serves the song as a vibrating anchor. I usally let the bass play in unison with the guitars in my other arrangements (check Neutralizer, Dive Phoenix Dive etc.) but here I decided to reduce the part to what I would call a classic 70's rock minimum. To give the sound a strange twist, I added a wobbly Leslie rotary effect to it, which I now find so important (especially in the slow part of letter F, p.4 and the polka breaks in letter E, p.4 and letter J, p.8) that I am now thinking of writing this sound as given into the score for the bass part.