As these last few days of summer drift away (faculty meetings start tomorrow for me), I had an unexpected experience a couple of days ago. I accidentally composed a piece! Ok, it's less than a minute, and it's quite derivative (of itself), but I still kind of like it.
The very short story is that I was trying out a re-install of Finale notation software (punchline: re-install did not solve my problem*), and so I just started entering notes kind of mindlessly. After I had three simple bars in three-part counterpoint written, I used some Finale copy/paste/invert techniques, and basically had something I kind of liked within no time. I have since tweaked a few things over the past couple of days. My main tweaking goal was to make it a little more naturally pianistic, but I ended up liking the way this requires the left hand to roll a few things.
It is very simple - somewhere between the worlds of Bartók and Poulenc - with no accidentals. Other than that, I might as well let its 50 seconds speak for themselves. I haven't really given it a title, although it does conjure up something of the feeling I have as summer vacation draws to a close. Perhaps it will be the beginning of something...
* also, the notation you see in the video was not produced in Finale.
Four or five days ago, a Facebook friend posted an image of the opening two pages from the finale of Brahms German Requiem. Alongside, he wrote:
"I've just spent 55 minutes on these nine bars. The downbeats evaporate at m. 5 like a bubble popping...."
Part of the experience of being a musician is getting happily lost in a tiny bit of music. Or maybe not always happily. I and, I'm sure, many other music students have memories of lessons where the teacher somehow never got past the opening bars. Although the purpose of such microscopic focus is to make sure everything is good under the hood when an actual performance happens, such moments are also part of the fascinating way in which music intersects with time.
These experiences can go both ways from a time perspective. I've been in rehearsals where obsessive focus on tiny details has made time seem to stop in the worst sense - a two-hour rehearsal suddenly seems like four hours. And I've been in rehearsals (usually when music is being run continuously) where time stops because one stops noticing time, only to realize that two hours felt like thirty minutes. Both are experiences of being lost in the music - one unpleasant and maddening and the other a state of flow or even transcendence.
Score study has a special relationship to time because it often involves mentally twisting and turning the musical object at particular moments to see what's going on inside, all while the real clock is still running. We often don't notice the paradox of how much time we might spend thinking about one or two seconds of music. Thus, getting lost for 55 minutes in the opening bars of a richly layered work can make a lot of sense.
Of course, I also playfully reinterpreted my friend's comment to mean he was just listening realllly slowly at a tempo which stretched 36 seconds into 3300 seconds. Indeed, stretching the music to last that long can actually be done, and I'll reveal what that sounds like below. There's a website called 9beetstretch where a complete performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, stretched out to 24 hours, is continuously livestreamed. That's stretching things by a factor of about 24. You may sample the effect here: the first movement only takes about 5.5 hours! I've never listened to the whole thing, but listening in is something else.
Mostly, the super slow Beethoven sounds like some sort of untamed ambient music. Even in the three instrumental movements, it often sounds like wordless voices from an apocalyptic soundtrack. The precision of a world-class orchestra is revealed at a fractal level to have all sorts of tiny discrepancies of attack which become rhythmic events of their own. The fact that music is fundamentally about vibration becomes apparent as the concepts we usually use to understand the vibrations (melody, harmony, rhythm) lose their meaning. If you know the quick-paced scherzo, I recommend sampling some of that in the x24 version because the notes go by quickly enough that it is just possible to follow what's happening. But it mostly sounds like...well, you decide.
So I was interested in various ways of slowing Brahms down, and though it is possible simply to distort the audio of a live performance to pretty much any length, I also thought it would be fun to hear a synthesized version where the notes are just played really slowly (and not distorted). This eliminates the otherwise inevitable imprecision of attack and pitch - so much that I found it necessary to add some very soupy reverb to smooth out the edges, creating a dream-state effect. I've tinkered with this on and off the past few days and have found the process really satisfying, even if the result is little more than a curiosity.
What I find appealing:
Getting to know just about every single note and instrument choice used by Brahms in this short passage. The time spent listening and manipulating is its own kind of score study. It's a kind of literal experience of what it means to get lost in the details.
Getting to spend time "conducting" the result by adjusting general levels and attack levels for various pitches, etc. I am no expert at mixing audio, but it is fun to think like a conductor, in this case using sliders and automation curves instead of baton and words.
Basking in the admittedly hallucinatory soundworld which results.
For various reasons, I settled on a much less dramatic stretch factor of around 3.5x. (Synth sounds are just kind of boring if note changes are too far apart.) This makes it quite easy to process the familiar music, but it still enables a new awareness of certain passing moments, like how non-harmonic passing tones create a lot of tension when one takes the time to listen to them.
Brahms' music itself is quite striking as a beginning (the beginning of the end of the requiem). Coming on the heels of the large-scale and emphatic sixth movement, this seventh movement begins as if in the middle of something over a secondary dominant. Sopranos first and violins next are sent into their stratospheres as we seem to be glimpsing heavenly realms. (The German text translates as: "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth.") The mostly rising accompanying figure in the strings is written so that the 8th note pairs are constantly reaching across the beats, which provides a restless kind of forward motion in what is otherwise a steady tempo. As my friend's quote at the top suggests, Brahms also plays with texture with the pedal bass notes dropping out after four bars, almost as if we're leaving earth's gravity behind.
So, hopefully you will find two minutes to indulge this little indulgent thought experiment of mine. At least I only did nine bars! You could do worse than to get lost in these good vibrations.
And though I do NOT recommend listening to all of the following, the technology just made it so easy to stretch Brahms' 36 seconds out to 55 minutes, I couldn't resist. My son and I did listen (please don't alert DSS) to the first seven minutes in the car yesterday. It takes a little over six minutes to get to the entrance of the sopranos in m.2. After that, the wobble of the high voices would probably give you a headache. (I don't make any claims for how precisely the yellow highlighter tracks exactly where things are!)
This is not my first entry into the world of videos that flirt with eternity. Here's a short playlist. My favorite, by far, is a very slow, synth string version of Schoenberg's gorgeous, but super dense a cappella Friede auf Erden. I find this "performance" to be genuinely beautiful. (I even...shh...kind of prefer it to the original!) The other three videos found here are more about looping infinitely, but I've listened to all of them all the way through with some satisfaction. Perhaps I have...unusual tastes.
I was flying back to Boston from Atlanta Friday night, and by good fortune had a port side window seat in front of the wing. I hadn't thought much of the view I might get on this budget Spirit Airlines flight, but as we descended from clouds into the Greater Boston area, I started noticing I could see a lot of detail out the side, although honestly the window looked too small and smudgey to think I could do any worthwhile photography. I took a few phone photos that looked pretty bad and kind of put the idea way.
Then as I started seeing the Boston skyline way in the distance, I thought this might be a nice approach and started video-ing. In this way, I captured the last two minutes of the flight in gorgeous, dusky skylight, with clear views of the South Boston waterfront all the way to the crossing of Boston Harbor (almost at water level!) and onto the Logan Airport runway which sits just across the harbor from downtown.
When I got home, I did some triangulating with Google Maps, working backwards from the very clear view of the "Rainbow Swash" design on a giant National Grid LNG tank that sits right on the ocean's edge, followed shortly thereafter by a spectacular view of UMASS-Boston and the JFK Library. In the opening of the video, I could pretty clearly see what looked like a cemetery, and after following the flight course backwards, I identified the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Boston's southeastern Dorchester neighborhood; the long white roof of another nearby location turned out to be the Ashmont MBTA station. Here's the basic flight path I retroactively charted:
Anyway, I came here not to talk about Boston geography (though the views coming in over the city and harbor are gorgeous), but rather to talk about the music I chose to pair with this majestic descent into town - because I had to share this video on social media, and the cabin sounds of overhead announcements are so pedestrian. [To be fair, although the views are awesome, you don't get a great view of the Boston skyline which is more classically photographed from a little further north across the harbor. The three tallest buildings in Boston (including the Hancock and the Prudential) can be seen early on rising up over Back Bay in the upper background, but as they are west of downtown, they always remain in the distance.]
When looking for the right soundtrack, I thought of the terms "soaring" and "flying," and I think I even did a search for those terms with "classical music." But on my own, I pretty quickly thought of the glorious "whales" scene from Disney's Fantasia 2000, which is accompanied by music from Respighi's Pines of Rome. There are lots of great "big finishes" in classical music, but this one has just the right kind of stately, inexorable grandeur that an airplane descent calls for, even if Disney has its whales ascending. (Notice how often slow, steady, rising scales are heard amidst all the gleaming fanfares.) It took just a little experimenting to get it to line up pretty well, and I feel confident in saying this soundtrack complements the visuals very effectively. In fact, for me the music elevates the experience quite a bit, mainly because the music is SO good. (But I'm also genuinely amazed at the quality of video one can get from an old iPhone through a small, smudgey window.)
This reminds me that just last week, I was looking for some music to go with a spirited game of tug-of-war between my dog and a niece's dog last week. In this case, I intentionally sped up the video for comic effect. I'd wanted to post it for family members but thought it awkward to include the unrelated conversation going on in the background, so I brought in some great fight music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and shortened the fight itself so that it ended along with a good stopping point.
One of my favorite aspects of this kind of thing is how our brains can find connections that weren't necessarily intended between sight and sound in such situations. I'll let you find your own! In the meantime, here are a couple of older posts/videos where I experimented with adding unrelated soundtrack music to new video.
In the former, video was edited to match some of the changes in the flow of the music.
In the latter, each repetition of the short looping video allows the viewer to make all sorts of connections between images and audio.
Curiously enough, I'm not always a fan of music doing so much heavy lifting in movies. I sometimes find the overly manipulative soundtracks someone like Spielberg prefers to obscure/overwhelm subtler aspects of storytelling. I'd prefer that good actors be given the room to act without music telling me what to feel, and sometimes silence is the best frame for that.
As a final note, I'll add that the first two videos here are evidence of what a wonder it is to live with high-quality cameras at hand so readily in the form of small phones. There's a lot that's wrong with smartphone culture, but I'd hate to give up this part.
Only a couple of days before Christmas, I mentioned using a "make myself write a fugue trick" by submitting a title for a work that did not yet exist for the Christmas Eve service leaflets. I suppose this trick works because it's very easy to commit by email to doing something, and I know that once the paper is printed, I will have successfully backed myself into a corner. It's even possible that I have done this in the past because it's easier in the moment to commit to writing something (which ultimately will take a lot of time) than it might be to find an alternative piece to play. I might be saving myself 10-20 minutes in the moment even though this will likely cost me many hours of work on the other end. Not a good interest rate, but still genuinely appealing to the true procrastinator!
Once again, after looking at this year's draft for the Easter Vigil leaflet, I knew I wanted something different for a slow/fast pair near the end of the service. The final hymn was to be We know that Christ is raised (#298 in The Hymnal 1982), sung to Charles V. Stanford's stirring tune ENGELBERG. So, before I even gave it much thought, I was signing on the dotted line to play a Prelude on Engelberg and a bit later a Fugue on Engelberg. All that was left was....well, the hard part of manufacturing notes.
I'm actually not going to go into too much more detail here about these new pieces and am choosing not even to reveal much of the scores, in part because both feel a little unfinished, even though I think they served their purposes well. (The prelude was needed during a quiet time before the final hymn; the fugue immediately followed that hymn.) However, I thought it was worth pointing out a cool trick I stumbled on (or did I?) for writing the prelude.
First of all, ENGELBERGis a really outstanding tune, very singable and featuring climactic Alleluias at the end of each verse. I actually think a historical disadvantage this tune has is that it is perhaps used too often with too many different texts. It apparently appears six times in the 1904 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and it appears three times in The Hymnal 1982. This can make it seem a bit generic when matched up against another famous stirring tune which also begins after a strong downbeat and also ends each verse with Alleluias, but which is very strongly associated with only one text. Still, it's a good sing:
I improvise quietly around hymn tunes pretty regularly, and though I would like to be much better at this, I felt pretty confident I could devise a simple plan for a nice, quiet, reflective prelude. I was sitting at the organ to see what I might come up with, and within just a few seconds, a little noodling had given me the idea that the first fifteen notes of the melody could be sped up into an ostinato pattern. (An ostinato is basically a musical figure which is designed to be repeated many times, "obstinately" one might say - at least in this case!) Here is the opening of the tune and then the ostinato figure it generates:
To be honest, there's not much more to this prelude, as I just added a simple ascending pedal line to the bass part and kept both repeating (with occasional variation) while a middle voice slowly works its way through the tune. It is quite repetitive, but it is designed more for quiet liturgical function than concert use, so I'm OK with that.
[Quick Confession Time: Although I do take some credit for devising this ostinato structure, I had remembered in writing this post that I had once looked at a large-scale organ Fantasia which Stanford wrote based on this tune. I think I even faked my way through parts of it before. In looking it up now, I only now remembered that Stanford, after introducing the tune in quarter notes in the pedal, immediately adds an improvisatory sixteenth note figure for the hands which certainly anticipates what I ended up doing, though he doesn't quote the tune as explicitly. It is somewhat likely that my subconscious memory of this passage helped to "inspire" my approach.]
The fugue is a pretty straightforward three-voice affair with quite a few modulations in a short time. The fugue subject uses only the first ten notes of the tune, although the closing Alleluias are referenced in the flexible countersubject material. [Fugue begins at about 3:05.]
Hopefully at some point I will post more polished versions of both, but here's what we have for now. Happy Easter!
No time for a major post to celebrate this blog's seventeenth anniversary. But I thought I'd post this fun video I made a little over a year ago. It's been on my list of things to blog about for all of that time, and I'd still like to say more about it, but the basics are as follows:
I'd created a worksheet for an Intro to Music Theory class which provided a series of arpeggios. The students' job was to identify the triad quality represented by each arpeggio. As usual with a worksheet, I made some effort to create a semi-random sequence of triads so there wouldn't be any obvious pattern to help students guess the answers. This also means that the patterns created were intended not to have any clear functional relationship from bar to bar. But...I noticed while absent-mindedly playing the page for the class that I kind of liked the way the unintentional progression progressed.
So, I tweaked a couple of minor things, added a bass line, and soon had produced this fun little bit of ambient music.
Of course, the blog has been sustained over these seventeen years by all manner of accidental inspirations, so aimless and random as this might seem, it kind of fits the spirit of MMmusing. Happy MMmusing Day!
UPDATE: I meant to add that this little "accidental composition" reminds me of the theme song for the "Cautionary Tales" podcast. (You may hear that theme used in context around the 3:10 mark here.) Has a similar off-kilter progression and a similar way of building up layers. So, if you have an off-kilter podcast and are looking for a theme song, let me know!
LYRIC POET: Are we embarking on a study of the meaning of meaning? YOUNGER BROTHER: I sure hope not. (from Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music)
NOTE: There are more than 550 possible outcomes.
About Me
MICHAEL MONROE
I'm a pianist and college music professor in the Boston area. This is not me. Neither is this. Curiously, these most Googleable Michael Monroe's are each musicians. This IS me.
