Archive for the 'Music' Category

A few months ago Ally asked me to collaborate with her to create some music for meditation. I’ve never done anything like that, at least not with that intention, so I approached this with a little trepidation. I’ve never been fond of most new age music I’ve heard, so I felt a need to push away from that direction. What’s funny is my first draft had this synth sound I’d developed which was the epitome of the new age sound. Ally nixed it immediately, thankfully. Interesting how sometimes we fall into the very thing we’re trying to avoid.

As things progressed I started finding the right instruments. I found a beautiful harp sound in the GPO, which is a harpist playing harmonics. I suspect what I have done may not be possible to play on a real harp, because of the technical limitations of playing harmonics on a harp. But the delicate sound is just right for what I’m after. I’ll have to ask a harpist sometime about it.

I still had another synth sound fading in and out in the background, which also got nixed. Ally said she preferred to keep it to natural sounds, and she’s right. It just feels right in that realm. She also really reacted well to the breaths I put between some of the phrases, so I reworked it some more and gave it even more space. I think it could probably use even more.

It’s very simple, harmonically — it’s all white keys. I think getting too complex won’t lend itself to the intended purpose of the music. Hopefully I’ll be able to accomplish what Ally asked me to do, which was to take the listener on a sonic journey while providing a backdrop for meditation and relaxation.

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A fugue is a form of composition which strongly emphasizes counterpoint. J. S. Bach was a master of the fugue and is probably the composer most famously associated with the form. I had this kind of general idea of the fugue but I’ve always wanted to study it closer and understand it enough to incoroporate fugal writing in my own compositions. So, this week was more of a homework assignment than a start of a piece. I found a great introduction to composing a fugue by Dr. Justin Rubin online and also this excellent interactive analysis of a Bach fugue (Fugue No. 2 in c minor from the Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1) linked from the wikipedia entry on fugues.

After studying these references I started following along Dr. Rubin’s intro and did my best to follow the rules and write my own fugue. Incidentally, these interactive online resources are so great because you can hear each excerpt as you encounter it in the text, rather than either taking a text book to a piano and banging it out, or glossing over it in the hopes of coming back to it later.

Here’s the score to what I’ve got so far. I’ve gotten as far as the exposition and the first episode (the last bar). Yes, it’s only 7 bars long. It’s an extremely dense kind of music and it’s easy to take a wrong turn and paint yourself into a corner, where the voices collide, etc. Despite the rules (or because of them) it’s quite fun to work on, and really gives me a greater appreciation for the masters.

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I’m trying something new starting with this week’s podcast. I’m going to see if this blog can coax me into writing more music on a regular basis. Each week I’ll be working on a sketch and posting whatever I’ve got on Sunday nights. The plan is to rotate sketches so on Monday I start working on a different one (either a new one, or once I have a few in the hopper, back to a previous one). I’ve jotted down some ideas for future sketches so I have a bit of a roadmap for the next few weeks. The idea is to create a deadline for myself, which I will keep to for fear of disappointing my (as of yet imaginary) audience. Keep in mind that although I’m posting this publicly, if it says Sketch in the title of the post, it’s a very rough draft and a lot will probably change in the final version.

This week’s sketch is tentatively titled Chamber Guitar for no good reason other than all the sounds will be produced by the various stringed instruments laying around the house (I thought there’d be a play on the word chamber too, but so far it just makes it sound fancier than it is). I’m playing with a method I’ve used with some success in the past, which is to simply sit down and imagine the piece before I start playing, and just write a verbal description of what’s in my head. Here’s my description for this piece:

Chamber Guitar Verbal Description

Lush, ethereal wash in background with slow but directed harmonic motion. Low, dull thud begins defining pulse (like a kick drum). Metallic scraping sounds, with some reversed flitter over the top, moving across the stereo field. A chorus of hammer-ons, in twos and threes, at first randomly distributed in space and time lock into a hocketing pattern, eventually defining a theme. These recede into harmonics, played by various guitars, which give way to a massive, sustained sound, with a slow attack and some distortion (mixed with reversed recording?), playing a melismatic, sometimes pitch-bending, melody based on the theme earlier expressed by the hammer-ons.

A bass line forms below. A texture of percussion fades in to join the thuds, with interesting eq (suggest snippets of these at the beginning). The massive sustained sound thins out and the hammer-ons return, this time building into hocketing chords. The percussive texture thins and the scraping metallic stuff comes back in. Focus again on the ethereal wash and the thud, which have been transformed by the previous interjections. Encore of the big sound and all the percussion to finale.

Notes:

1. Hammer-ons may be also combined with single staccato plucks.
2. Start the piece rising. Middle is combined rising and falling. End is falling only… maybe.
3. They may chain together to form melodic fragments (but no single track has the whole fragment).
4. They may overlap to form momentary chords, which are related to the ethereal chordal texture.
5. They slip in and out of being easily recognizable as guitars.
6. Bass line is pitched down guitars.
7. The ethereal wash is slowly, gradually evolving throughout the entire piece, but always recognizable.

This week I’ve sketched out some of the first paragraph. It’s a lot more jazz fusion / prog rock that I was going for, but there you have it. I imagined more of a glitchy electronica texture with the big electric guitar sound more like a guitar solo in a Radiohead song whose title escapes me at the moment. Well, on to next week…

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Scratch was one of my first experiments a couple of years ago with Apple’s GarageBand music creation software. The electric guitars were the only instruments I actually played — the rest of the tracks are built from canned loops included with the program. After recording the first guitar track I hunted around and found a suitable drum loop, and had it switch over to a more energetic version at the appropriate times. The bass loop was transposed to the guitar track. It needed something else for more character and after a while I found the tuba loop (no, not Tuvalu). About the only “tricky” thing I did was chopping the loops to fit some of the shorter transitions. It’s a bit like fridge magnet poetry, but the magnets are phrases instead of individual words. Cathartic, fun, and pleasingly odd. Despite the title, there’s no actual record scratching (wiki wiki); it’s just a “scratchpad” type sketch.

This is my first podcast as well. As soon as I figure how, I’ll post instructions for subscribing.

Edit: Aha. For iTunes, here’s a direct subscribe subscribe link. If you have a different podcast client, just subscribe to the rss feed for Banter, also shown at the bottom of the front page.

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