The Two Gustavs (Emptying the Desk Drawer #1)

[This is the first in a series of posts in which I simply document some of the odd little things I create when my internal virus is activated. In this introductory post, I'll begin with a quick exploration of the virus.]

Back when my blog was barely a year old and I nonetheless had the audacity to refer to "longsuffering readers," I wrote the following:

Longsuffering readers of this blog will have learned that I have a weakness for wordplay. (To quote my blogger profile, "I adore alliterations; elegant allusions; absurd non sequiturs; and buffalo wings.") My own experience of this weakness is that there seems to be a little software-like program running most of the time in my brain which samples incoming words, whether heard, spoken, read, thought, etc. and looks for connections that might produce something punny . . . er, um, funny.  .... 

[and, a few sentences later] Obviously, this software falls into the "virus" category, as I suggested awhile back about my sonnet "problem." 

[Note that I've also written about this kind of "punspiration" in another post.] 

In the same category as what might be called the "Dad Joke Virus" and the "Onegin Sonnet Virus" is the "Musical Mashup Virus." Indeed, if it turns out that I am merely some sort of AI automaton, this Pavlovian response would likely be my defining feature. When presented with any opportunity to combine two musical somethings which have been connected unexpectedly, it is almost impossible for me to resist finding a way. And there's always a way. Partly, this is simply about the pleasure of using magical technology (it all still seems magical to me because I grew up in a world before most of these tools existed), but it is also such a satisfying way to encounter or, dare I say, "play" [with] what is generally iconic music. Iconic music, by definition, is always at risk of being too familiar, so I think there's something useful in recontextualizing it by hearing it in conversation with something else.

On to today's exhibit. From a friend, I heard about a situation where a picture of Gustav Mahler was accidentally used in a video about Gustav Holst. Of course, I couldn't resist exploring this connection, and again, the more iconic the component parts, the better. For Holst, it was kind of a no-brainer to use the opening of "Mars" from The Planets, both because it's well-known and because it's suitable as an accompaniment to...something else. Since I had a Holst accompaniment in mind, the famous unaccompanied trumpet solo which opens Mahler's 5th raised its hand as a partner, and I liked the idea that the former emphasizes a low pedal G while the latter is centered on a C-sharp - an unsettling tritone apart. Of course, you might say, wouldn't it have been better if the two were centered on the same pitch or a perfect fifth apart? But since both openings express high stress, I think the distant dissonance (better here than a minor second) works well to set each work off from the other and take the stress to another level. 

And, as so often happens, other connections quickly became apparent, most notably the importance of triplets in each motif, but also the way Holst's opening tune in very low instruments (not shown here) settles uncomfortably on a tritone (spelled by Holst as D-flat) above the pedal G - which, with a little finagling, meant it could land on the same pitch (spelled by Mahler as C-sharp) as the Mahler does at the end of its second phrase. And that arrival provided me a good excuse to end things there and not go too far with this. 

My favorite thing about this little experiment was taking advantage of how easy it is to combine simultaneous time signatures in Dorico, music notation software I've been learning. You'll see that I displaced the "Mars" melody by one quarter (inserting a single 4/4 bar into its 5/4 context) to make it resolve with Mahler. (Technically, this melody is delayed by a full bar minus that one beat.) Although this puts Holst's melody out of sync with its own accompaniment, I think that works fine because the point of that accompaniment is that it is metrically unstable, due to the unusual quintuple meter and the alternation of triplets and eighths. I only wish I could get Gustavo Dudamel to conduct it, but Dorico + Note Performer do a pretty decent job!

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The idea of combining two works in which one is more distinctly melodic and the other more accompanimental is foundational to the most amazing live mashup experience I've ever had, which you may read about here. This is also the basic principle of my recent re-working of "Morning Has Broken" with a Bachian backup. And if that's not enough, the Double Gustav video now joins a long list of other such videos which you may sample here. 

Stay tuned for more random things I smushed together when I seemingly had nothing better to do.