Author: Prent Rodgers

I just learned that Franz Liszt was a serial recomposer. Wikipedia calls them “treatments”, but I prefer recomposer. He recomposed the work of over 100 composers, with the most numerous being those of Franz Schubert. I’m a real fan of Schubert, and of Liszt’s piano music. Today’s piece is a short minute and a half that captures what Liszt was able to do with a wonderful example of Schubert’s Müllerlieder (also known as Die schöne Müllerin.) number 1, Das Wandern.

The tuning is taken from the overtone series of 16/9, including the following ratios:

• 16/09
• 01/01
• 19/18
• 10/09
• 07/06
• 23/18
• 04/03
• 13/09
• 03/02
• 29/18
• 05/03
• 31/18

They provide a perfect just triad 4:5:6/4 in Bb and F, which are the primary keys in this piece. And the F major includes a perfect 7:4, for that flatted 7th.

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Das Wandern #1

This is still a work in progress. I made some alterations to increase the frequency of the c and d tetrads, those at the high end of the otonal and utonal limit, and ran several more iterations through the randomizer. The tempo is slowed a bit, and it’s now about 12 1/2 minutes long. This is the 19th iteration.

The tuning is described in this post.

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Balloon Drum Music #19

This is still a work in progress. I made some alterations to increase the frequency of the c and d tetrads, those at the high end of the otonal and utonal limit, and ran several more iterations through the randomizer. This is the 15th one.

The tuning is described in this post.

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or download here:
Balloon Drum Music #15

This is a work in progress, and I’m not sure I’m making much progress. This one has some interesting parts.

The tuning is described in this post.

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Balloon Drum Music #5

I spent some time making sure the slides and trills were correct, and discovered that since I was using the utonal slides on otonal scales, they were all off. I fixed that, and the sound is much better. This is a work in progress, as I’ve said.

The tuning is described in this post.

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or download here:
Balloon Drum Music #2

Here is the first transformation of the piece I wrote in 2005 called Balloon Drum Music. It made extensive use of balloon drum samples, but this one is all Bosendorfer. It’s primarily in Bb (16:9) with a bridge that moves through the rest of the keys shown in the graphic here:

I’ve divided the 16 note scale into four tetrads (4-note chords), as shown in the brown, blue, orange, and purple. The brown is 4:5:6:7 otonal or utonal 8/4:5:6:7. Those are major and minor 7th chords, in a relatively conventional just tuning. The blue is the next four notes in the over/undertone series, and the orange and purple are higher/lower in the series. There is lots of movement from brown to blue and back in the slides and trills. This version is taken from the previous piece, Resolution in Blue, with almost no changes other than the chord progression and the tempo. I plan to spend the next few sessions redesigning into something original. Note that in the chart, the major (otonal) scales go from low to high, and the minor (utonal) go from high to low.

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Balloon Drum Music #1

This is a piece I created some time in 2005. I plan to do some transformations of the piece. The primary tuning is shown here:

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Balloon Drum Music

This is another pass through the algorithm for this piece. A small change was made to the circle of fifths section. It had been restricted to either a rising or falling scale for the voicings of the tetrads in the circle. This version includes an alternative that minimizes movement of the notes from one to the next tetrad in the circle.

The harmony and tuning are as the one described here.

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Resolution in Blue #16

This is another pass through the algorithm for this piece. There is heavy use of indeterminacy, with the system choosing among lists of lists of lists of notes, phrases, slides, chords, arpeggios, volumes, sample sets, and the likelihood of erasing notes at random times to reduce density. This version uses same harmony and tuning as the one described here, with a few more iterations and a faster fade out.

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Resolution in Blue #10

This is a more or less final version of the piece I’ve been working on lately. It uses a progression that is close to a circle of fifths:

• A- minor
• F minor
• C minor
• G minor
• D# minor
• B- minor

The scales are all 16-note utonal scales, with the root each in position 9. So, G minor’s root is 3:2, A- minor’s root is 5:3, and B- minor’s root is 11:6. The descending notes are shown here:

The piece spends most of its time in A- (5:3) minor. There is a chorus that includes the circle of fifths voiced so that it sounds like it’s either rising or falling, even though it’s actually jumping up a 3:2 (or close to 3:2).

I’ve divided the scales into four tetrads, in varying degrees of consonants. Relative to the root of the scale, tetrad A contains 1:1, 6:5, 3:2, and 12:7, which is a pretty conventional just intonation minor 7th. Tetrad B contains 8:5, 24:13, 12:11, and 4:3. The other 8 notes are used less frequently, until the end. There are lots of chords that slide from tetrad A to B and visa versa. I also use many trills, and some slides with vibrato on long notes that sounds like a guitar with a whammy bar.

This is a transformation of a piece I wrote several years ago called “Resolution in Blue“, after the phrase the U.N. uses for a written draft of a resolution. This just uses the progression of that piece, and throws everything else away. Except the whammy bar.

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Resolution in Blue #7