Do not stand at my grave and weep

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep is a free of rights poem written in 1932 by Mary Elizabeth Frye. Frye allegedly found herself composing the piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag.

When I found the poem (as with all great findings, by accident :) ) it resonated with me, and I quickly found myself humming a melody to it. It's my first composition for a piano, clarinet, cello trio.

The piece is conceived as an elaborate harmonization of a single note ("e"). Throughout the first verse you can hum the note "e" to the melody. After a modulation the text is repeated and the pedal note becomes the note "f".

Enjoy!

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

Seaside canon, for Douglas Hofstadter

What?

Here's a musical crab canon inspired by a blog post from Julia Galef, who wrote quite an impressive crab canon poem. My musical interpretation of her poem is a crab canon too. It differs from my previous crab canon in the following aspects:

1.  This canon was conceived after serendipitously finding a poem written by Julia Galef, who kindly granted me permission to use it.
2. Compared to the previous crab canon, this one uses more and longer pedal notes. What can I say - I just love pedal notes! 
3. In contrast to my previous crab canon, this one modulates to different keys. Have you discovered my free modulation book yet?
4. As a nice variation on a typical crab canon (where you can reverse the score), here you can also reverse the raw audio samples. That's right! When you reverse the raw audio samples and listen to the result, you get the same piece again. Mind you: I'm not just talking the notes, but also the timbres! Nothing should sound more "backward" than in the forward version of the piece. You can try it out! Download the raw audio and import it into your favourite audio editor. Then listen to it, and relisten to it in reverse.
5. The spectrogram (slowly appearing in black on white) looks like the sea, and the score layed on top of it in colored rectangles looks like a frontal view of a crab. Very appropriate for a crab canon about seaside :) Ok, that's a joke (or not? Try squinting your eyes... :D ) 

 With respect to the images that pass by: in black on white you can see a spectrogram of the piece. In colored rectangles I've overlayed half of the notes that are being played in the canon (four voices). The other half of the notes you hear come from those same voices simultaneously playing backwards.

 I've developed a systematic method for constructing music canons, crab & palindrome canons, and table canons using Lilypond, fully documented in a series of articles that you can freely download and use. It's advised to read them in the order listed below:

Tutorial on my technique for writing a Canon
How to write a crab Canon
6-part Invention
How to write a table Canon

I'm aware that the method I devised in its current form still has limitations and does not necessarily yield music that can compete with the Big Composers, but who knows... I  still have some ideas for further experimentation. And besides, it's just too much fun :)

25 shades of random

A first exploration of algorithmic composition.

I've written a simple scheduler in the programming language python and I've created some midi event generators, and combined both of those to drive the software synthesizer Yoshimi and the sampler engine LinuxSampler using the jack-midi protocol. I've made the complete code available on github.

The midi events are generated based on a concept of randomness within constraints. The things you hear are randomly generated, but not in an "anything goes" manner.

Constraints are imposed to limit the disorder of the randomness. Just like harmony and counterpoint limit randomness in traditional composition, the constraints here limit randomness in the experimental composition. One could say that different constraints generate families of alternative music theories.

"Randomness within constraints" is a deep idea whose time has come. Nowadays it is extremely popular both in science (artificial intelligence) and art (abstract art) and indeed one of the basic mechanisms underlying the origin and evolution of life itself. I suspect that "randomness within constraints" is the barren wasteland where creativity and innovation hides. In this piece, I try to explore a number of different constraints. In some cases the constraints slowly evolve, in other cases they abruptly change.

Ton De Leeuw in a speech once distinguished between two kinds of music: "music that becomes" versus "music that is". "Music that becomes" is music that starts from a begin point and gradually evolves. "Music that is" is music that doesn't show any progression or evolution. Because the constraints I used are quite static (with some exceptions they don't gradually evolve as time progresses), I think this composition is closer to "music that is". Nevertheless, I hope that by combining different timbres and different constraints I have managed to keep the composition reasonably interesting to listen to.

Note: I do not consider "traditional music theory" (or rather: the different traditional music theory families) inferior or unnecessary (quite the contrary!), but in this piece I don't mind looking beyond its borders.

For this composition I programmed my own algorithmic composition system using Python, Rtmidi, Yoshimi and LinuxSampler with Sonatina Sound Fonts, but for a next algorithmic composition (if any ;) ) I would probably try to use the excellent supercollider environment instead.

The visualization was made with Sonic Visualiser.

Enjoy!

Carnival of the animals

Because it is fun to have fun once in a while...

Meditation for piano and cello

Meditation

A bootleg recording of my first attempt at writing something for a cello... enjoy! The score is available upon request. I've been told it's not that difficult :)

Digital sound design

I took a nice little course on coursera: a (very basic) introduction to digital sound design. Of course, as it goes with such courses, one must create a small composition demonstrating the newly acquired skills (or the lack thereof). I was in the mood for something experimental, so be prepared! Art or Nonsense? Feel free to leave your opinion. Incidently, the piece is dedicated to Patrick De Witte, a journalist and very witty humorist who died unexpectedly yesterday due a "heart failure" (he almost certainly would have seen some humor in this announcement: after all, doesn't everyone die of heart failure?). I didn't know the man personally, but I think he'd have gotten a good laugh out of it.

Musical key and mood

Key determines mood? Really?!

It is often argued that with the advent of equal temperament all differences between musical keys disappeared, i.e. C major doesn't sound fundamentally different from Eb major. Yet composers still attribute certain moods to certain musical keys. In part this is probably determined by tradition, and in part it may be influenced by the mechanics of playing an instrument: playing a piece in C major on a piano (using only white keys) is quite a different experience from playing that same piece in C# major (using many black and some white keys) because of the differences between physical location of black and white keys on a piano. Also, bowed instruments will often play an F# differently than a Gb, despite both being the same note on a piano.

So what are these traditional moods associated to certain keys?

This list is based on a list made up by Christian Schubart in his book Ideen Zu Einer Ästhetik Der Tonkunst...

Key	Mode	Mood
C	major	completely pure key; speaks of innocence, simplicity, naivety, child's talk
Db	major	key to bring out unusual feelings; can smile but not laugh; can grimace but not cry
D	major	key of triumph, hallelujah, war-cries and victory-rejoicing
Eb	major	key of love, devotion, intimate conversation with God
E	major	noisy shouts of love, laughing pleasure and not-yet-complete full delight
F	major	key of complaisance and calmness
Gb	major	key of triumph over difficulty, sigh of relief after difficulaties have been overcome
G	major	key that is rustic, idyllic and lyrical, calm and satisfied passion, any gentle and peaceful emotion of the heart
Ab	major	key of the grave, death, putrefaction, judgement, eternity
A	major	declaration of innocent love, satisfaction with one's state of affairs, hope of seeing one's beloved one again when departing, youthful cheerness and trust in God
Bb	major	cheerful love, clear conscience, hope, aspiration for a better world
B	major	strongly colored, announcing wild passions, anger, rage, jealousy, fury, despair and every emotion of the heart
C	minor	declaration of love with lament of unhappy love, sighing of the lovesick soul
C#	minor	penitential lamentation, intimate conversation with God, sighs of disappointed friendship and love
D	minor	melancholy, womanliness
Eb	minor	feelings of anxiety, the soul's deepest distress, brooding despair, blackest depression, most gloomy condition of the soul
E	minor	naive declaration of love, lament without grumbling, sighs accompanied by a few tears, desires to resolve into the pure happiness of C major
F	minor	deep depression, funeral lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave
F#	minor	a gloomy key, resentment and discontent, it languishes for the calm of A major or happiness of D major
G	minor	discontent, uneasiness, worry about a failed scheme, bad-tempered gnashing of teeth, dislike
G#	minor	grumbling, struggling with difficulty, heart squeezed until it suffocates
A	minor	pious womanliness, tenderness of character
Bb	minor	mocking God and the world, discontented with itself and everything, preparation of suicide
B	minor	key of patience, calm awaiting one's fate, submission to divine dispensation, mild lament without breaking out into offensive murmuring or whimpering,