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:
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)