New Piece

[njurkowski]

Hello all,

I recently composed a short piece for the Halloween concert our new music society at Bowling Green State was sponsoring. The concert revolved around a showing of the silent expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Grad students composed and arranged works to be performed as a soundtrack, and I wrote this for the carnival scene near the beginning. The concert was a big hit, and I got a lot of interest in the the funny little instrument I was playing.

 

Here is the music if anyone is interested - and a link to a quick and dirty recording of me playing it (I don't have the time right now to get a really good take, and my poor Stagi seems intent on going more and more out of tune). I tried to write in a style that was reminiscent of the work of the Expressionist composers (mainly Schoenberg and Berg) who were active in the early part of last century. Hope you enjoy!

 

http://www.mediamax.com/njurkowski/Hosted/sketch.mp3

 

Nick

[Robin Harrison]

Interesting piece Nick.........had a Halloween flavour;I think it would be a scary piece though to play with all those bunches of chords etc!! Notating it .let alone playing it must have taken you an age.

Well done

Robin

[David Barnert]

Interesting. Did you write it by playing it first and then notating what you were playing or on paper first and then learning it?

 

Edited to add:

 

Also, is this an English or Anglo (or other) concertina?

Edited November 5, 2007 by David Barnert

[njurkowski]

Interesting. Did you write it by playing it first and then notating what you were playing or on paper first and then learning it?

 

Edited to add:

 

Also, is this an English or Anglo (or other) concertina?

 

This was conceived of for and played on an English, though I imagine it'd work on a duet as well. Not sure about Anglo, but I'm sure there are people out there who could do it...

 

When composing this, I did a good deal of planning prior to writing the piece - the main theme is a translation of director R. Wiene's name to pitch classes (if anyone's curious about this I will explain it), and I use some 12-tone technique towards the middle of the piece, which demands a lot of planning. Much of it was also composed on the instrument, though, messing around with the theme and trying out different possibilities. Since it's not strictly tonal, it's hard to just sit down and and write-in conventional harmonizations. I wrote down the things I liked in sketches on staff paper, and put them together in Finale.

 

My focus in school is music theory, so I imagine that real composers' compositional processes are a bit different.

 

Learning the finished product took some time...there are a few really awkward fingerings in there, but I liked the sonorities.

 

Nick

[Hooves]

Hello all,

I recently composed a short piece for the Halloween concert our new music society at Bowling Green State was sponsoring. The concert revolved around a showing of the silent expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Grad students composed and arranged works to be performed as a soundtrack, and I wrote this for the carnival scene near the beginning. The concert was a big hit, and I got a lot of interest in the the funny little instrument I was playing.

 

Nick

 

It sounds very sound track like, I can picture scenes from a black and white mystery or horror movie from yesteryear.

[Dirge]

I think it's fun and I'd like to have a go at playing it even though it sounds very outlandish to my ears; it's a bit hypnotising so I must like the sonorities too! Do you have the wherewithal to pack it up as a 'not' file? I can then apply my very basic computer skills to producing a two hand duet score. If not, don't worry I'm sure I can cope as it is.

 

(About time you started saving for a duet, isn't it? You've all the qualifications.)

 

And you can explain the name to pitch classes bit to me, if you have the patience and don't mind.

[Dirge]

Hooves' comment, posted while I was composing mine is very on the nail as well, by the way. (I'm off to look up Dr Caligari on the net. Then I'll probably have to check on expressionism while waiting to hear about Herr Wiene. Oh, the deficiencies of my education.)

[njurkowski]

I think it's fun and I'd like to have a go at playing it even though it sounds very outlandish to my ears; it's a bit hypnotising so I must like the sonorities too! Do you have the wherewithal to pack it up as a 'not' file? I can then apply my very basic computer skills to producing a two hand duet score. If not, don't worry I'm sure I can cope as it is.

 

(About time you started saving for a duet, isn't it? You've all the qualifications.)

 

And you can explain the name to pitch classes bit to me, if you have the patience and don't mind.

 

Hooves' comment, posted while I was composing mine is very on the nail as well, by the way. (I'm off to look up Dr Caligari on the net. Then I'll probably have to check on expressionism while waiting to hear about Herr Wiene. Oh, the deficiencies of my education.)

 

 

I'd be happy to pack up the file in a way that allows you to arrange it for duet (I'd do it myself, if I knew the instrument at all!) Would you like the raw finale .mus file? That might be the easiest to edit.

 

I find the duet systems intriguing (especially the Crane, I think), but, like the rest of my concertina dreams - will have to wait until I get out of school.

 

I'm glad you're interested in the pitch class thing - I love explaining music theory, but realize it might not be so exciting as for everone...

What I did was really quite simple, and ties back to the techniques used by Schoenberg and Second Viennese School. Schoenberg and co. realized that Western Classical music was getting more and more dissonant and less tonal. Eventually, they started writing truly atonal music, and needed a new musical "language" of sorts to describe it, since saying A# instead of Bb implies some sort of tonal hierarchy. They settled on numbers for notes, and while their music was notated traditionally, they wrote about it and described it in their new system.

 

Under this system: 0=C, 1=C#/Db, 2=D, and so on up to 11=B. Thus, a C major triad might be described as (0,4,7) {=C,E,G}. It can all get very mathematical. Anyway, I took this system and mapped it to the alphabet, so,

A=0 (=C)

B=1 (=C#)

C=2 (=D)

...

L=11 (=B )

M=0 (because in pitch classes, there isn't a 12, so I started over at zero, so =C)

N=1 (=C#)

...

 

So it really just ends up being a simple cipher. Following this for the name "R Wiene," you get 5 10,8,4,1,4, or the notes "F, Bb,Ab,E,C#,E" which is my main theme, and comes back in various guises.

 

Schoenberg and Berg were very into numerology in their music, so I figured I'd do a little homage. I tried to use material from this theme when I could as harmomy, inverted and transposed. In bar 64, the material changes to being 12-tone in nature, but I break with that when the main theme comes back.

 

As far as expressionism, Berg's opera Wozzeck might be the best known dramatic work (based on Büchner's Woyzeck, but a lot of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern might be considered expressionistic: musical equivalents of Munch's Scream - trying for a distorted reality to describe the hidden feelings that lurk in all of us - I loved it as an adolescent

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is in the public domain now, so you can watch it on google video. I did a lot of improvising while watching the recording with the sound off when I was composing this. Here is a link.

[Dirge]

I am having an entertainingly educational morning; thanks for taking the time; interesting stuff indeed. As you obviously suspected I had to look up 12-tone too. As I read the explanation I was more and more of the opinion that this was a mathematical game and not much to do with music, but then I remembered that I've always felt that Bach's fugue's (which I love) were primarily problems he set himself to solve so I'll have to think that one through too. (Would Bach fugues exist if he had had access to crosswords and soduko? Discuss.)

 

I shall be keenly watching Dr Caligari in due course as the tail piece to all this diverting stuff. Thanks for the link.

 

I have finale on the desktop but am not used to it. At the moment I'm trialling Noteworthy Musician. This is very much aimed at people like me and I may well spend a whole $30 and buy it; you can take a midi off the internet and convert it into notes, reduce it to a piano score (which is a good starting place for duet), then delete notes and move them between staves, so I can convert a midi into useable music; it opens up a huge realm of free sheet music. In the case of your piece I'd select 'split hands', make the bass a treble cleff, and shuffle some notes between the hands and I'd be there. If you can save it as a .not file I can do that. If not, send me the .mus files and I'll experiment, but don't worry too much there's always pencils!

[njurkowski]

I am having an entertainingly educational morning; thanks for taking the time; interesting stuff indeed. As you obviously suspected I had to look up 12-tone too. As I read the explanation I was more and more of the opinion that this was a mathematical game and not much to do with music, but then I remembered that I've always felt that Bach's fugue's (which I love) were primarily problems he set himself to solve so I'll have to think that one through too. (Would Bach fugues exist if he had had access to crosswords and soduko? Discuss.)

 

I shall be keenly watching Dr Caligari in due course as the tail piece to all this diverting stuff. Thanks for the link.

 

I have finale on the desktop but am not used to it. At the moment I'm trialling Noteworthy Musician. This is very much aimed at people like me and I may well spend a whole $30 and buy it; you can take a midi off the internet and convert it into notes, reduce it to a piano score (which is a good starting place for duet), then delete notes and move them between staves, so I can convert a midi into useable music; it opens up a huge realm of free sheet music. In the case of your piece I'd select 'split hands', make the bass a treble cleff, and shuffle some notes between the hands and I'd be there. If you can save it as a .not file I can do that. If not, send me the .mus files and I'll experiment, but don't worry too much there's always pencils!

 

 

Well, I'm not sure about the .not format, I'm afraid (they don't seem to make the Noteworthy Musician for mac, unless I missed it, but it seems like a really useful program). If I could extract the midi file of the piece from the finale document, could you use that (I guess it'd be a .mid file)?

 

As to your feelings about 12-tone technique...it's a touchy issue for a lot of composers and theorists, because there is definitely some truth in what you say: it can be far less like music and more like math. For the past 50 years or so, serialism (as an outgrowth of 12-tone) has been the prevailing force in the academic music scene, at least on the East Coast of America (and people wonder why no one listens to new classical music...). Schoenberg really believed that people would be whistling twelve tone rows - that his was the music of the future. Tonality is definitely making a comeback among American composers now, however, and total serialism is definitely in decline (at least in the states).

 

I tend to like Berg's usage of 12-tone - it was less concerned with numerical perfection and more with actual music. Webern's music was widely viewed as the music of the future by theorists, but it's really hard to get into, because it is so angular sounding and...weird - there's never anything to grasp hold of. If you study it, you can develop an appreciation, but I'm not of the opinion that you should have to work that hard to appreciate art.

 

Tellingly enough, Berg's Violin Concerto is really the only piece of 12-tone music regularly performed by professional symphony orchestras for public concerts. Berg is definitely the most approachable, and it's because he tries to hint at and imply standard tonal relationships in his rows. Oddly, this got him laughed out of a lot of circles ("Triads? In 12-tone music? NEVER!") but I think as the century progresses, historians will look back on Berg as being the most forward thinking of the Second Viennese School, even as he was considered by his compatriots to be the most backward.

 

I think that any method of organizing music is a means to an end, and that end should be for the listeners' ears...so it's all in how you use the tools you have.

 

Oops...that got a little long. I'll be starting my thesis next year, and I'm planning on writing about Berg's influence on contemporary classical music, so it doesn't take much to get me off on wild tangents about it...

 

Nick

 

P.S. Good point on the Bach fugues. I'm currently learning the first one - very difficult for someone of more modest piano skills like myself. I certainly love them - have any enterprising Duettists tried transcribing them? I could see them being easier on a Duet than on a piano, actually.

[Dirge]

Looks like your thesis is half formed already....I'm absolutely with you on "not of the opinion that you should have to work that hard to appreciate art. "

 

The place a duet falls down relative to piano is you have to move in two dimensions on the keyboard not just side to side as on a piano. Keeping another voice moving around a held note can get tricky, although you can hold and even crescendo a note without needing trills and the like. I've only got as far as 2 part inventions so far, but give me time. The range is sometimes a problem, although stuff Bach wrote for the clavichord often fits unmodded. (Fugues seem particularly wrong things to muck about with, to me; spoils the whole sense). On the other hand, you can't get a harpsichord in an overhead locker.

 

The midi file ought to work fine, I think. I'll send you an email to give you a return address.