Fantasias on Bach Chorales from the St. John Passion for Large Ensembles

This is a set of pieces that are the result of my recent work on two tracks:

  1. Creating a way to have a program search for and select tuning for 4–voice chorales in a form of just intonation that minimizes the ratio numerator and denominators of all the ratios between the notes of each chord. This is not a tuning that Bach would have used, but I think it produces a more dramatic effect. This eliminates all beatings between notes, and selects the strongest possible sonorities that are available.
  2. Creating an algorithmic composition technique that creates interesting music automatically.

Download the whole collection as a single zip file at the bottom of the page.

The first piece is the simplest in the set. It is just one verse of the a Bach chorale from the St. John Passion: “Jesu Leiden, Pein und Tod”. There’s no extensions of time, arpeggiation, octave manipulations, exotic envelopes, or other transformations. The rest of the pieces are much more complex. All are scored for a large ensemble of woodwinds, brass, strings, electric guitars, and finger pianos in different combinations.

bwv245.14f


bwv245.28b

bwv245.3b

bwv245.37d

bwv245.11a

bwv245.5b

bwv245.40b

bwv245.26b

bwv245.22b

bwv245.17b

bwv245.15b

bwv245.14b

Download the whole album as a zip file of high quality MP3 files here: Prent Rodgers Just Chorale Zip File

The code used to create this is available on my github page here: https://github.com/prentrodgers/Auto_Just_Intonation/tree/main