Trio Nearly in C-minor (Bach Corrects a Student's Composition Exercise)

     

This trio (for Flute, Bb Clarinet, & Contrabass), bears the sub-title "Bach Corrects a Student's Composition Exercise". Although the title suggests a lighthearted "the-dog-ate -my-homework" attitude, the music is nevertheless a serious two-minute micro-essay encapsulating a musico-pedagogical issue which troubles me deeply. In fact, one might claim that the entire future of serious music composition - and acceptance by audiences - depends on discovering answers to it. Yes, it's another angle on the "old-VS-new" debate. 
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Rather like fiddling with prayer beads, my piece obsessively counterpoints the melodic fragment (at left) which is to some extent counter-intuitive to "normal" diatonic musical syntax.  It stubbornly resists 'working' in the conventional ways which the diatonic ear has long been propagandized to expect. Trio Nearly in C-minor sets out to reconcile this "square-peg-in-a-round-hole" issue, and at one point even gets the benefit of a little subtle encouragement and modelling from the Master (originally, of course, in red-ink quill pen).
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You'll find the SoundCloud recording in the right-hand sidebar >>> Just click its orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
  http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/trio-nearly-in-c-minor
In either case, please ensure that you use hi-fi equipment or good-quality enclosed headphones or you will entirely miss the vital bass.
Apologies for the noise in this recording - there was a problem with the file [grr *shrug*].
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And if you wish, you can read the pdf score here.
The transposing score is here.
Both the music (mp3) and score are downloadable and free. Prospective performers are only requested to acknowledge me as the composer on programs, fliers, sleeve notes or announcements. I'd also be kinda flattered if you let me know, too :)

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A genuine forensic reconstruction of the real face of J.S. Bach.
In this link, you can witness a historically unprecedented gallery
of photos of Bach as a child, a teenage rapper, and even one taken
during His previously unknown concert tour to Thailand in 1733.

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 Trio Nearly in C-minor is a token attempt to absolve myself of the sin of years of preaching the Holy Musical Rules (yes, 'those' Common Practice Rules handed down to you on tablets of stone from Bach and Moses during those endless Harmony & Counterpoint tutorials). Thou Shalt Not end a piece with a first inversion. Thy Leading Note must rise, not fall. Parallel fifths or octaves are sinful, etc etc. Sure, you could recite them too?

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 I knew that continuing to teach The Rules, ultimately, was to knowingly collaborate in creating a poisoned chalice for the future of Composition. There I was, assisting to brew up an educational potion which had the potential to cause serious long-term paralysis of our culture's collective creative/receptive mind. A doh-ray-mi straight-jacket to anaethetize the creative musical brain which had been born free-and-curious. What had I been thinking?? OK, here comes the excuse: I had to earn a living, mate. Yep, some people do it for money, lol. Sheesh. This still happens in educational institutions ranging from the "ta ta tee-tee ta" pre-school variety right through to undergraduates honing their skill at writing four-part harmony. Been there, done the lot. Cramped a lot of imaginations. Ruined countless lives.
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 Music Composition is surely the ultimate candidate for nomination as a Rule-Free Creative Zone. Therefore it bothers me that The Rules get handed on so unquestioningly, usually with rather vague understanding of why they even exist, or who made them up. People have been fed the idea that music is somehow controled by inviolable universal natural laws which could not possibly be questioned. Musicians get awarded impressive Degrees and Diplomas for reproducing and obeying The Rules. They then go out and, in turn, pass on their half-knowledge to other victims, usually younger and powerless to resist. And thus the cycle repeats down the generations... a virtually identical process ever since the start of the 19th century, pretty much. And even Arnold Shoenberg's commented wryly that "Zair iss shtill a lot off goot music to be reeten in C-machor, ja?". Yes, undeniably true - I've done heaps myself, of course - but the point is: Why limit oneself to a bread-only diet?
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 The problem is inflexible and difficult to tackle - music is arguably THE most conservative of the Arts. Most people will accept innovative modern art, architecture, literature, etc, as a cool thing, but when it comes to music most folks, even some "music lovers", just want something familiar and easy, a safe and predictable armchair ride, mindless chewing-gum for their ears.
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And from the music teacher's point of view it is all too easy to continue to teach an established method which clones exactly such safe and unchallenging panaceas. You can buy ready-made mass-produced text-books divided into neat eminently teachable chunks designed to fit conveniently into semesters. To teachers, the alternatives look all too hard, requiring too much thawing of mindsets, re-jigging of knowledge, curricula, and texts... and probably wouldn't even occur as useful to most conventional musicians.
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 Yes, one certainly needs to know [and understand] The Rules sufficiently well in order to break them successfully, but they are but one of the many systems of musical thought which have evolved over the last 2000 years or so.  How about codifying and teaching the style of the Notre Dame School of 12th century Paris? Or the Burgundian School around Dufay with their ear-tickling cadences? Or the Palestrina Style? The Debussy Style - (which actually requires parallel fifths)? Pan-Diatonicism? The Schoenberg-Webern Style? Quartal harmony? Minimalism? Raga? Micro-tonal scales? There are so many possible musical universes and systems apart from the narrow constraints of our beloved Bach. You need to break eggs in order to make an omlette.
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Many contemporary composers who have consciously challenged and overcome the mental shackles of their Education (and, consequently, have grown Ears to Hear) are certainly using all these alternative doctrines - and more - but (crucially) their audiences, the vast public, are mostly limited to making judgements according to the fosillizing doctrines of Bach - whether or not they are aware of it. ("I dunno the first thing about music, mate, but I do know what I like, eh"). Indeed, they may not know a Leading Tone from a First Inversion, but they do have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding (albeit untutored and 'naive') of what constitutes 'normality' in western music.
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 Theirs is is an inarticulate understanding, partly intuitive, partly acquired, which has been absorbed simply by years of unconsciously hearing and absorbing "normal" music in locations ranging from supermarkets to concert halls. Everyone's a sponge... to varying degrees. Everyone will 'learn' that just about all western music from Machaut to Mozart to Madonna has structural elements in common when it comes to topics like harmonic progression/regression, phrase structure, melodic conventions, key/tonality, form, etc. This mute concensus, those understood commonalities of musical grammar and syntax are precisely what permits musicians to improvise together without rehearsal. They 'know' the language. They intuit its grammar. Through sheer experience, they have learned the traditional hierarchy of probablities - a B7 chord is highly likely to be followed by some sort of chord based on E, not E-flat. The average listener (and even some musicians!) will instinctively squirm if phrases aren't symmetrical, if they can't tap their foot because the beat is ambiguous or absent, or if the harmonies deviate significantly from the expected Cycle of Fifths. People often prefer to reach for the OFF button than be forced to actually focus attention in the same way they would if, say, reading a book or watching a movie.
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The end result of limiting options, simplifying and cloning musical education is that the average person tends to emerge with a clamped mind about what is Right or Wrong, Good or Bad in music. Those who become music students end up being able to write a stylistically correct Bach Chorale (in fact, so correct that it's boring as batshit), and that ol' magic just, well... evaporates.
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At this point the proverbial 'elephant in the room' ought to be apparent to the observant reader: relatively few musicians of any age - or audiences, for that matter - are likely to be craving new Bach Chorales in the year 2012. There are heaps of them out there to nick anyway, if you need to google something up for next Sunday's choir...
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Let's face it, The Rules are nothing but a codified instruction manual for imitating the very specific style of music used in Protestant churches in (northern) Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. A fairly narrow slice of musical history, one might observe, but even today is preserved in historical ether and presented as Eternal Immutable Law to unsuspecting young devotees. The teaching of these precepts mostly happens in sterile tutorial rooms, soundless but for the scratching of pencils and rubbers. Very few students can actually hear anything they've written, but hey, they obeyed The Rules, step-by-step, and passed their assignments with an A+.  May we present you with your BMus degree... now Go Ye Forth and propagate likewise.
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In terms of a liberal Arts education, this is totally outrageous propaganda in the league of Chairperson Mao or Joe Goebbels. The method is nothing more than a musical notation version of a "Join-the Dots" puzzle, a Composing-by-steps 'How-To' Manual for tone-deaf people who can't hum two consecutive notes in tune let alone hear the three notes of a triad. It offers prescriptions which allow novices to write complex counterpoint which doesn't actually sound entirely "wrong", even if it is terminally klutzy, awkward, and uninspired. Dumbing down and oversimplifying. The musical equivalent of literature's opening line "It was a dark and stormy night". And for goodness sake, don't embarrass people by asking them to explain WHY they can't end with a first inversion, make their leading note fall, or write [gasp!] parallel fifths.
Yes. We. Can.
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In my piece Trio Nearly in C-minor, Bach personally intervenes at one point to suggest a harmonisation of the melodic fragment in the style to which He is accustomed. I'm confident you'll detect when it happens, and (you'll be relieved to know), I committed no parallel fifth sins. Bach wisely decides to squeeze the fragment into the tonal straight-jacket of C-minor. To our ears, His sweetly familiar harmonic language with its formulaic predictable cadences homing in relentlessly towards the inevitable tonic c-minor chord seems, in this context, to be oddly and ironically out of place ...even 'wrong', or at least inappropriate.
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The poor student whose work he is correcting :) thankfully appears to be entirely unrepentant - except that the piece does actually end on a (albeit very brief) triad of C-minor as a polite concession to Great Teacher. It's as if the music's embarrassed not to cadence in C-minor, having spent most of the piece nowhere near C-minor or any other type of minor or major for that matter. And [*shock*] the final triad isn't even in first inversion! My my, isn't tradition tenacious?! But hey, ya gotta please the teacher if ya wanna pass, ja?  Er, 7 out of 10 was OK, I suppose... Hmm, let's see, what do I need to do to score 8 next semester?

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Dear Reader, having joked thus, I must emphasize that I certainly do not disrespect Bach. On the contrary, if you've heard my other compositions, you'll know that I meekly worship His music, and take his Holy Rules seriously. They are part of the cultural DNA inherited by all of us, practising musician and non-musician listeners alike. But unless we really do want yet another Chorale, The Rules should only be a point of stylistic departure, merely one of the available options in the 21st-century's incredibly rich Global Style Buffet. An unexpected mixture of systems, even conflicting ones, can produce interestingly tasty results: fusion cuisine comes to mind. Impossible opposites can be a great source of inspiration, if you grant them an educational visa to enter your mind.
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For your delectation, here's my latest piece of Concept Music, cereally composed over breakfast this morning with the textbook Harmony & Counterpoint for Dummies open on my lap.
The easy-to-perform musical score goes as follows:

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..... 1. Close your eyes and gaze into your Blackness...

..... 2.  ...then into that Vast Silence begin to imagine a

........... .tender duet between a whale and a mosquito.

..... 3.  Allow them each to solo, then to sing together.....

..... 4.  Gradually allow the performers to fade away. 

..... 5.   When the music is finished, open your eyes and

..... 6.   if you enjoyed the performance, applaud.

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*Try performing the music again to discover if it is the same on the second time around.
*Try performing it a third time with animals/sound-sources of your own choice.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou

You've been a wonderful audience I love you all.

How Slowly Dark - a musical tribute to pianist Noreen Stokes

Noreen Stokes records for Radio Malaya in September 1950. At the time I was months

away from being born, and perhaps already absorbing some musical insights in vitro.

I cannot imagine finer or more profound music lessons than these.

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 My latest piece, How Slowly Dark, is a humble attempt at a musical tribute to my ageing mother Noreen Stokes O.A.M., retired concert pianist, accompanist, and piano teacher. Her tragic and inexorably increasing blindness, now almost total, ironically parallels the deafness of her beloved Beethoven.

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Listen to the music at
 http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/how-slowly-dark
or click its orange PLAY button in the right-hand sidebar > > >
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 The idea behind How Slowly Dark leapt at me the moment when I read Theodore Roethke's haunting and melancholy lines:
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The piece is a dream-soundscape, deliberately rather formless and wandering - as dreams are. Strands of familiar piano music float from my childhood into the present moment, evolving on their journey into an aural tapestry, a private look into my mind's inner ear. Where will these fragments travel after this? And likewise, what is it that each of us might, in turn, bequeath to the future?
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This time there is no printed score. Instrumentation comprises: Piano, Classical guitar, Strings, ATTB choir, and tuned Percussion.

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The opening fades up into a brief passage from Liszt's La Leggierezza, a virtuoso concert study which requires from the pianist a light, nimble, lyrical, and understated touch. The piano crossfades into a guitar adaption in a new key (as, in my misspent youth, I was often fond of doing).
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Enter J.S.Bach - unexpectedly - smack in the middle of the guitar passage. One of the concealed elements glueing this patchwork dream together is a Bach Chorale, the same one borrowed by Alban Berg for his Violin Concerto, his tribute to Manon Gropius. Es ist Genug ("It is Enough, Take Me Now") was one of the last chorales written by the ageing Bach when he was going blind: I therefore deemed it to be eminently suited to the present circumstance, especially given that my mother enjoyed learning German. I borrowed Bach's melodic tritone (G, A, B, C#. See Box 1, below):

The opening of Bach's chorale Es Ist Genug, performed as 'vocalise' on this recording.

The original key was A-major, highly symbolic because Bach symbolised its three

 sharps as the crosses on Calvary Hill. Hey, one cross is enough for me. 

(PS: Bach is not responsible for the last few notes).

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 Although the fragment in Box 1 is entirely tonal, functional, and - yes - 'legal' in Bach's harmonic language, I nevertheless grasped the opportunity to fashion the whole tone scale into un-Bachlike whole-tone harmonies, especially my beloved augmented triad. As a child, my ear gravitated instinctively towards any occurences of augmented triads (major triad with sharpened fifth degree), although then, of course, I had no technical words nor understanding, just feeling. Here, today, it constitutes the perfect compositional excuse to evolve towards Dubussy, yes? Sure, I can do anything I choose inside my own dream. The dear old augmented triad has not dulled with age or familiarity... formal musical education has failed to erase its melancholic magic (thank goodness).
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But Bach can always be mined deeper. Box 3 (see the bottom of the score) is a series of rising chromatic semi-tones. This motif becomes a "pillar of the temple" in the dreamworld of How Slowly Dark, woven throughout the entire piece no matter which composer happens to be at hand. The observant ear will already have detected it pervading the Liszt-based passages for guitar and choir. Liszt beat me to the idea, dang it. Fragments of it - as well as the whole-tone elements - emerge and recede frequently in the fabric of the sound like a kind of structural glue. Eggs in the musical cake-mix, perhaps. The chorale is only quoted at any length at the very end of the piece - as was Bach's own habit in his Cantatas. It may be worthy of note that both these elements, the whole-tone scale and the chromatic semi-tones, rise in pitch - and (hopefully) in spirit - surely an appropriate metaphor for my mother.
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At about 20sec, the strings fade up in C major during the E major guitar passage, converging on a cadence which merges the two keys into a chord of E augmented (E, G#, B#,  which is enharmonically equivalent to a chord of C augmented, ie C, E, G#):

(Interesting to note, by the way, that Es ist Genug is the only

one of Bach's chorales in which He used all twelve tones)

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 The F, F# and G of the cello and double-bass are part of a normal formulaic Baroque cadence in the key of C major (implying ii - V/V - V), whereas in the context of E major, Liszt's E#, F# and F-double sharp perform a highly chromatic and purely melodic/colour role. Aligning these enharmonic notes whilst superimposing and contrasting their keys makes for an interestingly ambiguous cadence: is the root C or E? In effect, it's both, really - the guitar's low E is very close in pitch to the cello's C, so there is no obvious front-runner in terms of the chord's perceived root note. After this brief Ives-inspired side-trip (thanks, Charles!), the guitar resumes briefly back in E major - just as if nothing had happened. Perhaps it hadn't even noticed the choir...
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As the guitar fades, the dream drifts into a meditative choral arrangement - the same piece of Liszt, yet utterly transformed. The paradigm Piano à Guitar à Third medium, a sequence neatly summarizing my entire musical life (as Listener, then Guitarist, lately Composer), sets the underlying format for subsequent sections of the piece.  The choir begins multi-layering the rising chromatic motif in the manner of an introduction, after which it presents a quartal re-harmonisation of the four-square Liszt melody.
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As the voices fade on a cadence of C augmented, who should materialize out of the mist but Monsieur Debussy. The first movement of Debussy's Pour Le Piano deliberately explored augmented chords by using them in a non-functional and colouristic manner (ie requiring no 'resolution'). Rebellion! Mutiny!  Mozart's Universe turned on its musical head. Crikey, these chords were no longer expected to resolve to pre-ordained destinations - they could just "be". I recall as a child hearing my mother play Pour Le Piano and vaguely thinking "Hey, there's that funny sound again... and gosh, there's another... and another!" Interesting to reflect that Debussy's piece was composed in 1901, a mere sixteen years before my mother's birth.
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 Meanwhile, Bach's chorale again looms up like a pale watercolour wash to provide a ghostly background floating behind Debussy's stridently rhythmic piano chords. This time the choir offers the rising whole-tones of the opening phrase itself, Es ist Genug: It is Enough.
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 As per the blueprint, Debussy's piano gives way to a guitar adaption - necessarily a thin-blooded mock-up and hardly a match for the piano, of course.  What was I thinking! Thankfully, stimulated by Debussy's strings of augmented chords, my dream dissolves into a more guitaristically sympathetic and lyrical passage of guitar with string accompaniment. This is actually a brief quotation of my own piece for chamber orchestra, Reconciliation, whose sound-world seems (on the surface) to be as stylistically remote from Debussy's pianism as it is possible to be. Nevertheless, in musical terms, it is closely DNA-related by its free use of of augmented harmonies à la Debussy. Thank you so much... may I call you Claude?  And of course - equally - thank you to my mother for performing it so sublimely. Both pieces do what Herr Bach would have considered ridiculous and illogical - attempting to tonicize/stabalize a chromatically-altered chord whose normal "Common Practice" syntactic function is that of a species of dominant (by its nature inherently unstable).
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 After the string passage, the violin evaporates in a rising whole-tone scale (generated - again - by the augmented harmony), into which Chopin delicately floats the theme of his Ballade No 1, another pianistic pot-boiler from my youth. My mother adored Chopin, who, in his heart-warming and enlightened Romantic Wisdom, invariably managed to remember to obey The Golden Rule which obliged the sharpened fifth note to resolve by step (in this case, Bb to A):

(Technically, the Bb ought to be A#. Chopin wrote it like this to avoid
notational clutter and to make the fall in pitch more visual, bless his socks)

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 But the ever-observant Guitarist :-) notices the rising augmented triad (bracketed above) and immediately feels inspired to let loose a volley of three successive augmented arpeggios, each one beginning a semi-tone higher, recalling the earlier chromatic motif. In this manner the two motifs, based respectively on the whole-tone and the semi-tone, are finally merged, and thus the circle is completed. And not even one of the augmented chords feels any pressure to resolve. Do I pass my test, Monsieur Debussy?

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 Several passing percussionists, one of whom may well have been Toru Takemitsu, notice the three semi-tone motif and decide to play with it as a cat teases a mouse. This continues in a rhythm-free microtonal zone until the guitar steps in, tentatively takes matters into hand by re-instating tempo, crystallizing an unexpectedly conventional cadence, and framing attention back onto the piano's final entry. We hear a snatch of Schumann's Papillons (from Carnaval Op.2, another of my mother's epic favourites), before it disintegrates into nothingness. It is in its original key of C, even though this fragment begins on its V chord (G). The tonic C is only implied, not stated.
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 The Schumann is soon comprehensively submerged by the Chiangmai Bach Choir's otherworldly vocalise of the entire opening section of the chorale Es Ist Genug continuing in a radiantly clear G major, thereby prolonging the dominant of C.  Its three phrases, too, fade slowly, glacier-like in their tenacity and endurance - almost as if locked in a hapless struggle against inevitably encroaching Darkness. Heightening the sense of "unfinished-ness" is the fact that although the chorale begins anchored on the tonicized centre of G, the last phrase skids off a banana-skin C# towards its dominant key, D. But not only that, but you land gingerly on a very un-final and slippery triad of D augmented. The music ends before it finishes, awash in a sea of ambiguity, heart-breaking pathos, and incompletely fulfilled potential. One thing's for sure, whatever comes after the final silence is always up to you.
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By now the final three notes of the chorale excerpt (G#, A, A#) will probably be more self-explanatory (refer back to Box 2 in the first diagram). Analytically, the final harmony could be C: II^#5, ...or perhaps C:V^#5/V ...or your ear might demand G:V^#5 (or even D:I^#5 if you were totally outfoxed by the persistent C#) ...but aw heck, who really cares? It feels tonicized/completed in a strange kind of a way, but it isn't. It can't be - unless you decide to let it. Whatever the case, the Memory will probably linger in your mind after the Sound has died away.
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Noreen Stokes was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in January 2000

for services to music, especially for accompaniment and art song.

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She organised a recital soon after arriving in post-war London from Capetown.

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(Click on any picture if you need to biggen it)

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 By Xmas 2007, mum could just manage to see a small faint area under strong lights.
She still maintained her discipline of technical practice every morning from 7-8 am.

Nowadays (2011), she feels too disheartened to even attempt to go to a piano.

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Post Script: Noreen Stokes passed away
on Sunday 11 March 2012, aged 94.
RIP at long last, Mum.
I can still hear your music.

Fibonacci's Rabbits - the sound of one mathematician thinking.

Woo-hoo, I've dumped MySpace as a music-hosting service. Instead, you can now listen to all my music online via the "SoundCloud" hosting website. Muuuch better :)

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You'll find the SoundCloud recording in the right-hand sidebar >>>
Just click its orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:

http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/fiibonaccis-rabbits-the-sound

In either case, please ensure that you use hi-fi equipment or good-quality enclosed headphones or you will entirely miss the important sub-tones.
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If you wish, you can read the score here.
Both the music (mp3) and score (pdf) are downloadable and free.
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Many things in Nature, such as cabbages, pine-cones, sunflowers and snail-shells all grow in spiral patterns controlled by the series of numbers known as the Fibonacci Series. The 12th century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered that exponential growth occurred if the last two numbers of any series were added together (eg, 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13; 8+13=21, etc). As with Bartok, who always composed with a pine-cone on his desk, these numbers provided the very simple genesis for my short piece "Fibonacci's Rabbits".
 
When considering the dimension of musical Pitch (assuming one is counting by semitone), the Fibonacci Sequence neatly generates the ratios which create the intervals comprising the major triad. The 'cell' in the first bar-and-a-half of my piece, for instance, outlines the triad of C-major. At this point I choose bypass the usual debate arguing "Co-incidence or Causality?" ...as that is not my purpose here.
 
The Fibonacci Series can also be applied to the dimension of Time. Counting by demi-semi quaver (DSQ), my cell exponentially stretches out in time-values as the numbers of DSQ obey the dictates of the series.
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Once I had established the mechanical aspects of this cell, however, Rationality was summarily overuled by Art. I proceeded to present the cell in the freely imitative fashion of a Renaissance motet, symbolic of the ordered growth yet highly chaotic interaction of plants in Nature. This image was triggered in the first instance by watching the astonishingly rapid growth of the Climbing Spinach Vine on our Chiangmai balcony.
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The Fibonacci Series can be taken a step further - to suggest Form in music. As the ratios of the numbers spirals from 1+1=2 right through to higher numbers such as 13+21=34, 21+34=55 and so forth, the ratio increasingly accurately converges towards the decimal fraction 0.618, known as the 'Golden Mean', an irrational mathematical constant. View more complete examples here and here. In my example, the number 21 comprises approximately 0.618 of the number 34. Hence in my music, not unlike the music of countless other composers in history, I engineered the the climactic point to occur at about six-tenths of the way through - an aesthetically pleasing proportion which defiantly sidesteps symmetry. That accounts for the off-centre position of the Mona Lisa.
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I gleefully noted the presence of the G# just after the triad in my cell, which immediately authorized me to write my beloved augmented triads (C-E-G#). The successive entries of the cell in the keys of C, E, and G# (bars A/B/C) resulted in the extended high-pitched augmented triad which materialises in the high notes towards the end of Bar 6:

Similarly, personal choice determined the extended quartal harmonies - traditionally and accoustically  more stable/final than augmented triads - which serve to conclude the piece:

The final gesture includes the only instance of a cell which falls in pitch - symbolic, perhaps, of decay and death  as the necessary counterbalance of growth, the ends of empires, the eternal wheel of life.
 

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Other interesting stuff about the Fibonacci Series:
* The piano keyboard from C to C has 13 keys comprising 8 white keys and 5 black keys, split into groups of 3 and 2.
* In any key, the 'dominant' note is the 5th note of the scale, which is also the 8th note of all 13 notes that comprise the octave. Note that 8:13 = 0.61538, which approximates phi. It's precisely that assymetric wildcard which makes a musician's and (theoretician's) life interesting and happily irrational.
* The spiral layout of cabbage leaves ensures that the smart little plant receives the maximum possible sunlight over the span of a day.

Diverse Variations on "Happy Birthday". Don't send 'em soppy e-cards, send this mp3 instead

Ever need to email someone a fun-quirky (but tastefully arty and not crass) birthday greeting? Here's your solution. I have concocted a short set of variations on (you guessed it)  'Happy Birthday'. 
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You'll find a recording in the right-hand sidebar >>>
Scroll up to find it, then click its orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
 http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/variations-on-happy-birthday
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 It's a quartet for flute, oboe, bassoon and a part-time percussionist). You can download a free copy in mp3 format, in a file-size that's easy to email. Whenever one of your friends has a birthday, forward them a copy with my compliments. Guaranteed low in carbs. Bingo.
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One of the variations features an embedded version of "Yellow Submarine". Ten marks if you can spot it.
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I doubt anyone but the true dilletante will want a score, so there is no link for that. I could easily make one if requested, though, and hey, I'd probably feel sorta flattered :-)

Kaleidoscope for String Septet

Kaleidoscope (4 violins, viola, cello, and double bass) sets out to be the aural equivalent of a kaleidoscope's ever-mutating patterns and colours. This project has been gestating for ages, yet remains as a draft for a bigger piece.

You'll find a recording in the sidebar >>>

Just scroll up till you see it, then click the orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/kaleidoscope
 Please please use decent quality headphones or sound system or you'll miss out on both highs and lows. It's even better to press headphones close in to your ears. Laptop speakers are a waste of everyone's time.
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If you wish, you can read the score (in pdf format) here.
Both the (mp3) recording and the score are free and downloadable.
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I've deliberately selected a mono-chromatic photo [above left] because my piece employs only string timbre... it awaits a future project to significantly vary the instrumental colour palette as well. This 'limitation', however, enabled me to focus on harmonic colour. Another huge advantage of 100% string instrumentation is the ability of strings to blend seamlessly, so useful to my purposes here.
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The project was inspired principally by the French composer Perotin (of the late 12th century Notre Dame School)... but actually sounds very little like him (oh, how I do delight in being contrary and annoyingly cryptic :-) I've always been impressed by the vision and magnificence of Perotin's organa such as Viderunt Omnes (this link to Youtube opens in a new window: after listening, simply close it, and you'll be back here). Its cornucopia of cascading sound was Perotin's musical response to the glittering kaleidoscopic refractions of light flooding in through the enormous stained glass windows of the then newly-completed gothic Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. One can't help also recalling Messiaen for the same reason, of course... I'm sure they would have enjoyed a chat.
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Magister Perotin was in awe of the sheer height of the cathedral's lofty ceiling, which soared vertiginously above all the comparitively squat architecture of the conventional Romanesque architecture of the day. It was this which prompted him expand the music of his predecessor Leonin from two parts to four, a vertical expansion analagous to the cathedral in which the music was to be performed. Now, with four parts, Perotin could now weave a denser musical web of sound, more a massed sonic "fabric" rather than the limpid clarity of Leonin's two polyphonic strands. Not only creative and visionary, but mighty courageous, I'd say. Respect, dude... high fives, etc. The Beethoven of the 12th century, no less.

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Perotin, like most church musicians of the time, composed by successively adding melodic layers above the Cantus Firmus, or lowest voice. The Cantus Firmus (CF) was usually a melodic fragment of Gregorian Chant, but stretched out to be so glacially slow that its melodic character was effectively denied, serving instead simply as a musical foundation (these days it's the 'bass') on which to build upwards. This not only offered the composer ready-made tonal structure on which to add his own layers, but conveniently ensured that the church could not criticize the music for ignoring God or the liturgy. However by contrast, in my piece Kaleidoscope, the CF is both freely composed and decidedly secular - vaguely inspired by the theme from the Pink Panther. Those slow-moving parallel fifths appealed to my Debussy-inspired bad-boy streak, my love of questioning not only the What but also the Why of the so-called "Rules" of music. Anyone in the Arts who adheres to Rules needs to be interrogated under hot lights.

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For instance, one of the traditional cornerstones among the Rules of conventional part-writing is the preference for "contrary motion"... eg, when one part falls, the other[s] rise, etc. So [perversely], I decided to move all my parts in similar or parallel motion. The four lowest parts [comprising the CF] move solidly in parallel octaves and fifths (8,5,16,32) - hence the faint suggestion of the Pink Panther. As with mediaeval organum, this is, in reality, a 'thickened' single line, the cello, viola, and fourth violin merely reinforcing the contrabass by amplifying its primary overtones. To get high enough, in fact, the fourth violin plays in harmonics throughout, soaring quietly over the other violins, creating not so much a melodic contribution of its own but a faint and mysterious overtone haze. Only at the Chorale-style coda are the four instruments in this lower group given any real melodic independence from each other - this is purposefully done at that point in order to prompt the listener's expectations of a more conventional polyphonic 'tonal' environment.

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Likewise, the three violins jointly constitute [for the most part] another single thickened line, tightly bound together, moving mostly similar motion like strands of a rope. I nursed the very tactile image of shoppers jostling in the crowded alleys between market stalls - personal space in Thailand is practically a non-issue. I also imagined the violin "trio" as a metaphor for a churning river of sound, like a painter twisting his brush as he moves it over the canvas. These three strands are melodically independent of each other, but I made them obey several self-imposed restrictions (mm, yeah, OK..."rules"!):

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1. The three strands are confined mostly within a narrow tessitura of [about] a fourth. When an upper or lower voice rises or falls, the others are obliged to follow [albeit in a quite elastic manner] in order to respect that narrow tessitura. That way, the ear is more likely to hear them as a single entity, a broad 'ribbon' of sound.

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2. Harmony is mostly quartal/secondal. Some conventional chordal moments do occur, but only as momentary flashes of colour as if from facets of a revolving diamond. Relatively rare events like this are non-functional for the most part, and (statistically speaking) democratically represented within the extensive universe of intervallic possibilities inherent within the span of a fourth.

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3. As with all harmony, quartal or otherwise, the succession of chords may be chosen to manipulate levels of relative consonance and dissonance. Needless to say, it is impossible to build a conventional triad within the span of a fourth. A chord built from two major seconds will sound relatively consonant by comparison to one built from a major second plus a minor second. Two minor seconds will seem even more dissonant. More so three... which is possible here because the violins are heard as an 'overlay' on top of the Cantus Firmus, generating almost limitless gradations of harmony and dissonance for the composer to manipulate. The three voices are not related to each other in any conventional sense according to the Rules of harmony or counterpoint, except at times of my strategic choice where I choose to hint salaciously at tonal direction. 

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4. Staying roughly within the tessitura of a fourth does not preclude the three violins from approaching each other even more closely at chosen moments in order to generate increased harmonic tension [eg, see bars 17/18 and bar 38]. This process is the logical continuation of a thousand years worth of music history: the exploration of the harmonic potential of the upper end of the Overtone Series. It's already been done in Electronic Music because technology has made it easily possible. But it pays to keep things in perspective - Monteverdi in the seventeenth century was howled down by critics for using unacceptable dissonance... and he had done no more than write a 7th chord whose 7th wasn't suitably 'prepared in advance'. Um.

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5. Importantly, the three violins should mostly remain rhythmically independent of each other. This deliberate offsetting of rhythms vastly increases the number of momentary passing chords and harmonic colours available on the composer's palette, sometimes two or three changes per quarter-note beat. It is the very genesis of the title "Kaleidoscope". This also serves to suppress any unequivocal sense of beat, which is left more to the slower-moving lower group, creating the effect of superimposing a fast movement over a slow one. The effect of such rhythmic independence in the trio is analagous to that of the painter smudging one colour into the next in gradual transition of hue.

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In summary, while the score requires seven instruments, these actually function in two groups, ie., I conceived this essentially as two-part music [low in opposition to high]. Most of the time there is space between the two groups, as well as contrasting rhythms, so the ear may more easily distinguish them from each other. The bass group moves in a generally lower realm than the treble group, which prefers to soar higher in my conceptual Cathedral of sound-colour. On occasion, however, they do briefly collide and fuse. Between the two groups there is no consistent use of contrary motion: according to the dramatic needs of the moment, you will hear a mixture of similar and contrary motion.

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All this talk of breaking rules seems a bit hollow when you suddenly realize that the entire piece is securely in the key of C. Not C-major, thank Buddha, but "C-centric": I weave a texture of harmonies around the note of C, not the chord of C. In a quasi-conventional way, there are vague tonal implications as the music approaches the dream sequence beginning at bar 26. The music gravitates back to the note of C at structurally significant points (eg., an implied cadence on C at bar 33, in spite of the G# bass(!); bar 38; a rise to high C at bar 38; implied cadences at bars 43-4. The final chord is also built on the note C but is intentionally 'unstable' in conventional terms, but is heard as stable by contrast to the body of the piece. But (horrors!) you'll hear pure C-major scales in bars 46-9; and the final chorale from bar 50. Even at the opening, the violins highlight the high notes e'' and g'' in bars 12 and 17... all very conventional stuff if subjected to the scrutiny of Shenkerian analysis).

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Post-script: Because my piece was written specifically for computer-generated performance, I allowed myself to take the liberty of writing the double-bass part right down to low C below the bass clef. This enabled the double-bass to, as it were, creep slowly out of the Creation Swamp at the start, then crawl back quietly into it at the end. Why? Cuz I enjoy the noise it makes on the computer - I don't care too much that real double-basses can't play down that far... (yet).

 Pierre Gorgon-Symes:
Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits.
A composer is probably working hardest when staring blankly out a window.

Fantasia on a Theme from "Buppha Rahtree"

 
What's a sweet little Thai schoolgirl like this doing brandishing a dripping cuthroat razor? I recently watched a sub-titled Thai language horror/romance/comedy ghost movie titled Buppha Rahtree 3.2 ("Buppha's Revenge") and sensed under-exploited musical potential in its theme - hence my latest composition, below.
Instrumentation: flute, violin, cello, double-bass, synth and piano.
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You'll find a recording in the right-hand sidebar >>>
Just scroll up till you see it, then click the orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/fantasia-on-a-theme-from
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If you wish, you can read the SCORE (in pdf format) here.
This will open in its own window so you can scroll thru while listening to the music. Both the score and the mp3 recording are free and downloadable.
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You can watch the teaser here if you want to (opens in a new window). That will also permit you to hear the theme on which I loosely based my next piece. My own music, however, is more an independent composition than a straight arrangement of the film's theme. The two falling semitones (Eb-D-C#) heard in the ominous opening are heard again when the main theme begins in the flute, but they appear buried in the accompaniment. The climax of the piece (at Rehearsal letter E) occurs at the 'golden mean' - which I always measure in time, rather than bar numbers because bars are not always the same length.
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For the record, here's the poster, featuring the usual de rigeur Thai heart-throbs:

Thai people know for sure that ghosts exist. Ghosts and spirits are integral to Thai stories and legends, but also feature heavily in the reality of Thai daily life. In Thailand, "Spirits of the land" have been living here forever, and we humans are ephemeral visitors in their eternal realm. We must accord them respect as elders and owners and ensure they have an attractive place to live - which accounts for the spirit house attached to virtually every house, shop or condominium. Keep 'em happy and feed 'em, and they won't disturb us.
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However, some ghosts can prove more problematic. Ghosts of people who have recently died may not yet "understand" that they are in fact dead, and continue to roam around seeking their family and friends - until such time as a local monk performs a ceremony to inform the ghost that it's time to 'cross over'. Or, worse, a few malevolent ghosts seek revenge for violent deaths - which was the case with our cute little razor schoolgirl in the film Buppha Ratree.
Read more about Thai ghosts here.
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Er, no, it's not a ghost... it's my alter ego in the morning before coffee.
Hey, nothing makes any sense before coffee.

SO glad you could visit my blog.
It's been lovely - but I have to scream now.

Quartetus Interruptus (The "Nokia Quartet") for woodwind trio and mobile phone

Telephones are considerably more mobile they were in the Good Old Days... nowadays they have mutated into Machiavellian Devices specifically designed for interrupting classical concerts at crucial moments. Therefore I felt impelled to write a Woodwind Quartet (oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon) to immortalize the insistent penetration of the Nokia Corporation into the musical fabric of Western Culture. There is nothing especially novel or innovative about this - many mediaeval motets of the 13th century, too, had street-vendor jingles of the day woven into their fabric.
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You'll find a recording in the sidebar >>>
Just scroll up then click its orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/quartetus-interruptus-the
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If you wish, you can read the score (in pdf format) here.
A transposed performance score is available here.
Each of these links will open in its own window so you can scroll thru while listening to the music. Both score and mp3 recording are free and downloadable.
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Did u know that Nokia's irritating little tune was surgically extracted from a classical guitar solo by Francisco Tárrega (his "Gran Vals"). You can hear the relevant brief soundclip, live on guitar, of that piece here. Thanks for nothing, Frank. This tiny .wav audio file should only take a few seconds to open.

As Howard Dietz once quipped, "Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism".  My Quartet is probably (as with most "original" compositions) a subconcious re-editing of various pieces I've enjoyed but "forgotten", a sort of musical potage-compilation. It's deliberately "pretty" - and there's a good reason for that. I wanted it to sound like a prim and proper little mainstrean chamber piece, the accessible melodic sort which might be preferred by normal "music lovers".  Therein lies its vulnerability, its ultimate doom... as the audience relaxes and drifts along with the music, Unthinkable Horror can happen... even at a concert-hall NEAR YOU.

I had gleefully noticed that Tárrega's little telephonic ditty roughly conforms to the conventional I-ii-V-I harmonic formula:
That's why Quartetus Interruptus features innocent short phrases which frequently incorporate such ii-V-I sequences (circling through a variety of keys). This gave me the opportunity to surgically implant or rather, superimpose the Nokia tune over a number of my own phrases.
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Quartetus Interruptus could actually work viably just as a trio of oboe, clarinet and bassoon. In terms of conventional part-writing, it doesn't really need to be a quartet. BUT (unbeknown to the audience) the spare fourth performer is a desperate Terrorist clutching a mobile phone which has been cleverly modified to appear like another clarinet, silently waiting to ambush the ensemble when s/he detects a suitable.moment. The devastating Nokia tune can then be cruelly detonated to inflict maximum casualties. The unfortunate fact that the audience is usually seated closer to the mobile phone than to the musicians means that the penetrating Nokia ringtone can sound relatively louder than the music itself. With this in mind, it would be okay/fun/alarming for the second clarinet to be placed next to, or for novelty's sake, even among, the audience ;-)
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Surely this telephonic intrusion comprises nothing less than Musical Terrorism on a mind-numbingly pervasive international scale! The Mobile has mutated into Phonezilla, a deadly "Weapon of Muse Distraction" ...and Dubm Dubya never even recognized it for the threat it is (coz he's probably never been to a concert :-) Surely everyone else on the planet has by now been the helpless victim of a laser-guided Nokia bomb.
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This next photo represents how I feel in the brutal aftermath of such a bunker-busting attack, musically stunned, limping through the decimated remains of the beautiful musical landscape-that-was... 

  Listen out for the renegade bassoonist who, in a moment of weakness? insanity? corruption? .briefly becomes a willing accomplice to the Nokia suicide bomber, before regaining his senses. The bassoon, always the buffoon of the orchestra, of course gets the Nokia tune slightly "wrong". At one point, the music is hijacked and fooled into changing key by a rudely insistent mobile. 
mThus, the entire piece is gradually colonized by this lightweight jingle. Prepare Ye Your Ears for a few brief moments of utter telephonic chaos when all the mobiles in the audience begin ringing together - the music goes completely "out of focus" during a poly-rhythmic rhythmic canon. It sounds chaotic ...but, ironically it is arguably the most structured passage of the entire piece (and - perversely - it's the bit I like best :-)
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Also beware the very end - there's an unexpected but subtle visitation by the Nokia startup tune, then an unexpected Nokia grenade hurled by a disaffected concert patron, followed by the musical equivalent of a staredown: the loudest silence you'll ever hear. Eventually though, Moral Fortitude triumphs...
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Speaking of Moral Fortitude, I suggest that before anyone is permitted to enter a concert venue, they should be frisked or x-rayed and any mobiles temporarily impounded. Offenders whose phone interrupts the concert should be required to stand onstage for the remainder of the performance, then be frog-marched off by the Music Police to a sound-proof padded cell and forced to listen to my "Nokia Quartet" looped 12 hours (a.k.a. "music-boarding"). As a newly-converted Music Jihadist, I'm considering applying to perform with this ensemble on YouTube.
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Although Quartetus Interruptus is clearly a "novelty piece", I think it still hangs together in its own right in a fairly integrated way. As George Bernard Shaw once quipped, this music is better than it sounds. Your beloved Nokia tune appears right at the outset although you might not immediately recognize it embedded in quartal/secondal harmony. Its rhythm is distorted and the normal pattern of accents displaced, creating the world's first Waltz in 4 beats to the bar. Plus there are also a couple of extra passing notes snuk in to throw you off the scent... marked with x 

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Tarrega's Granvals is a waltz, so (naturally :-) I deliberately wrote my own piece in duple time in order to generate rhythmic conflict-of-interest: the triplets of the Nokia tune are pitted against the twos and fours of mine. Likewise, the Nokia ring tone is quite disjunct (the notes mostly leap around by wide intervals), therefore I made my piece smooth and melodically conjunct. That makes the jagged mountain peaks of the Nokia ringtone leap out dramatically against the languidly rolling countryside of my own music. Lastly, the piece also addresses one of my favourite quests, a seamless interface between Tertian and Quartal harmonic systems (particularly in the Intro and Outro).

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ADVERTISEMENT:
Out of respect for the Muses and sensitive concert-goers' ears, I'm thinking of re-marketing various vintage "less-than-mobile" phones in order to discourage saboteurs from sneaking them into concerts:

Retro mobile phones

Waltzing Mad Hilda (for two pianos)

ABANDON YE FORTHWITH your Quest to find the ultimate encore piece for your next piano duet concert - you've just found it! Especially if you happen to be piano duetists of an Australian persuasion.
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Waltzing Mad Hilda comprises no more than a single Verse & Chorus of Australia's real national anthem, yet showcases a wide range of styles. In fact, it is a veritable smorgasbord of genres, a light-hearted international frolic packed into a mere 1 minute 30 seconds. From moment to moment you get snatches of Jazz, Bach, Ragtime, Chopin, Blues, or Viennese Waltz etc. Expect anything.
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You'll find a recording in the right-hand sidebar >>>
Just scroll up, then click its orange PLAY button >
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Alternatively, you could listen to the music at its URL:
http://soundcloud.com/peter-gore-symes/waltzing-mad-hilda
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If you wish, you may read the pdf score here.
This link will open in its own window so you can scroll thru while listening to the music. Both the score and mp3 recording are free and downloadable.
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The melody line functions as a simple Cantus Firmus threaded through most of the piece which, once identified by the performers, can be deliberately made a little more prominent if desired. To this end, melody notes are often placed in prominent positions rhythmically (eg, bars 18-19 have them placed as high notes on the beat, in spite of the flurry of semi-quavers). The Introduction (bars 1 & 2) and the Outroduction (bars 28-31) are freely composed.
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Bah. This cryptic pic of a sheep was put here to whet the curiosity of those who are not familiar with the story behind Waltzing Matilda. Who was Banjo Gore-Paterson?
And what the f*** is a jumbuck anyway?