Music
The first half of the piece has the same concept of "Hey You", being a distress call from Pink. The second half is instrumental. An interesting part of the song is the classical guitar solo, as it is not widely known who played it. In several interviews, David Gilmour said that he tried to perform it, and was not satisfied with the final result ("I could play it with a leather pick but couldn't play it properly fingerstyle"). Accordingly, session musician Ron Di Blasi was brought in by Michael Kamen to play with the rest of the orchestra. Gilmour also says that the song was composed by Bob Ezrin, with the understanding that Roger Waters would receive credit. The shrill siren-like sound effect used during this song is also used in an earlier Pink Floyd work, "Echoes". The noise was originally used as a sort of whale call for the deep-water-based "Echoes", and is created by Gilmour using a wah-wah pedal with the guitar's output going into the pedal. The guitarist in the song, Joe DiBlasi, is often referred to as "Ron DiBlasi" because Roger Waters only remembered that it was a three-letter name; Ron was the closest name he could remember to Joe when creating the record.
Read more about this topic: Is There Anybody Out There?
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“As if, as if, as if the disparate halves
Of things were waiting in a betrothal known
To none, awaiting espousal to the sound
Of right joining, a music of ideas, the burning
And breeding and bearing birth of harmony,
The final relation, the marriage of the rest.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle, dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.”
—Richard Shuckburg (1756–1818)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)