Composition
"Unfinished Sympathy" is a trip hop track, and makes use of instruments common to tracks in the trip hop genre: keyboards, strings, drum machines, and turntables.
The song title is a play on words, regarding the phrase "unfinished symphony", which refers to a fragment of a symphony left by composers that are considered incomplete or unfinished for various reasons. In context of the song, the lyricist is missing something of the one she desires.
Sampling is also utilized: the percussion loop of the song is sampled from the song "Parade Strut" by American composer J. J. Johnson, from the soundtrack to the 1974 film Willie Dynamite. The "hey, hey, hey, hey..." voice that recurs throughout the song is a sample from John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Planetary Citizen". The voice was sampled without clearance.
Read more about this topic: Unfinished Sympathy
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
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“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)