![]() ![]() ![]() It became the first single from her album The Kick Inside, written in the span of a few hours while she sat at her piano late at night, and her vocal on the track was sung in a single take. Her 1978 breakthrough was the song “Wuthering Heights”, inspired by the Emily Bronte novel and written from the perspective of Catherine, a ghost. I’ll use Bush’s groundbreaking 1985 album Hounds of Love as a focal point. Instead of attempting a penetrating analysis of any of her albums, I’ll instead offer an overview, a guided tour to some of her most important songs (or at least, a personal view of the ones that have resonated with me), and a look at some of the musical attributes that make her work so unique. Her arrangements for the Bulgarian folk vocal group Trio Bulgarka provide a crucial textural element to several songs on her 1987 album The Sensual World, and the Irish Uilleann pipes are used in her song cycle The Ninth Wave to symbolize, like a leitmotif, the spark of life amid a near-death experience. She weaves multiple musical styles and genres into her songs, including Western classical and a wide range of non-Western and folk musics. In addition to being the first musical artist to use a sampling synthesizer on an album, in 1978 she was the first performer to fashion a wireless headset microphone (out of a coat hanger). Her style is sometimes referred to as “post progressive” due to her bold approach to themes of love and relationships, and other topics usually presented from a male perspective, by earlier British progressive acts like Yes and Genesis. 1 single by a woman, and she was the first solo female artist to enter the UK album charts in 1980 for her album Never for Ever. Her first single, “Wuthering Heights”, from 1978, was the first self-written UK no. She was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own albums, taking sole production credit since 1982’s The Dreaming. ![]() She is so many things to so many people: groundbreaking artist, songwriter, performer, producer, feminist, technologist, choreographer and video artist come immediately to mind. I also realized that presenting anything useful about Kate Bush in the space of an hour, while leaving ample time for listening, was just about impossible. As a child of the 80’s, sounds like these are etched into my musical DNA. This album relied largely on the iconic sounds she conjured from of her Fairlight CMI, the first sampler-based music synthesizer/workstation, which came out in 1979. ![]() It’s an embarrassment of musical riches, from Bush’s wonderful melodic sense, to her adventurous use of unusual forms and harmonies within a pop music context, to her hyper-expressive and utterly unique style as a performer, to the intertwining of music with other art forms like dance and literature, and finally to her constantly surprising use of time and spatial effects in her mixes. University of Massachusetts Lowell Department of Music Spring 2021 Headphone Lecture Series:įor tonight’s session, I knew that I wanted to share some of Kate Bush’s music with you, simply because from the first time I heard her Hounds of Love years ago, it immediately became my favorite album. ![]()
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