Month: February 2010

This is a final version of this piece

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O Sacred Head, Now Wounded is one of my favorite hymns. It started life in the 11th century as a poem, later set to music. Bach harmonized it around 1734.

This version is scored for mallet instruments and woodwinds, specifically marimba, vibraphone, finger piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and sine waves. The basic idea is to keep the marvelous Bach harmonies but stretch it out a bit. Each chord is repeated or held and arpeggiated before moving to the next one.

The tuning is low integer just, approximated in 72 EDO. You can see the specific ratios used in the chart above. Click on the image to make it bigger.

This is a work in progress.

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I’ve finished the first run through of the piece. It’s not quite ready, but I’ve run out of time to create the CD, so it’s what gets burned there.

This is a work in progress.

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This still needs a lot of work, but the basic outline is done. This piece has 63 chords, compared the the previous one with only 37. The specific deconstruction technique I’m using doesn’t scale very well: it takes lots of keystrokes to do each manipulation. The basic idea is allowing a chord to arpeggiate for as long as it wants to before moving to the next one. Scored for woodwind quartet and mallet instruments for now.

This is a work in progress.

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This is a work in progress.

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This is a famous Bach harmonization of an 11th century song attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153).

This is a work in progress.

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Revised to increase the variability of the attack time. There’s a variable in each note that adds a few random milliseconds on to the start times of notes. I had it in place for the marimba, and now it’s in place for the vibe, finger piano, and harp as well.

This is a work in progress. Take 13.

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The piece is pretty much complete now. I’m running several iterations and picking the one that sounds the most interesting now.

I’m calling these pieces “Transformed Hymns”, since they are derived from traditional protestant hymns. This is the first, based on a 15th century German carol. Each note is allowed to stretch out for one to five notes, at varying tempos and volume.

This version is scored for finger piano, harp, marimba, vibraphone, and balloon drum. The tuning is 72 equal divisions of the octave using these notes:

• C 1/1
• D 10/9
• D 9/8
• E 5/4
• F 4/3
• F 25/18
• G 3/2
• A 5/3
• A 27/16
• B 16/9
• B 9/5
• B 15/8

This is a work in progress. This is the first stanza of the hymn with some deconstruction. Each chord is repeated an indeterminate number of times, playing faster or slower, with different types of arpeggiated alternatives.

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This is a work in progress.

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This is a work in progress. Or most of it…

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