Original Music Compositions

Andes Off! (Peruvian Faux-Folk)

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:01:46 -0700

While my wife and I were travelling back down the coast of California (near Big Sur) from a vacation around New Years, we stopped at a turnout over a cliff, and took a bunch of video of at least 15 California Condors, flying and hanging out on the guard rail, not 15 feet from us! These amazing birds, once almost extinct in the wild, are now being re-introduced on the west coast. When full-grown, they can have a 10-foot wingspan, the largest land-birds in North America. I have about 15 minutes of amazing video of them in flight, or sunning themselves in the trees, or ambling around looking at the growing crowd of people, who are stopping to look at them in return. I am hoping that despite their apparent lack of fear of people, they remain safe. Due to lots of interest, I have edited down the condor video and have posted it on YouTube (see below), or click here to read a little write-up of the trip.

As part of the ending credits, I needed a quickie "Condor" theme, so I whipped this up. It is supposed to evoke Peruvian/Bolivian style folk music.

This music was used in 2009 for a German College student film.

Metamorphosis - NGC6302 (space ambient)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:54:44 -0700

story: wings of chaos, wings of beauty. h.g. wells awakens from cyber-sleep in the "Chrysalis". the steam-driven moth-ship is now traveling slowly across an immense nebula. the engine's motoric rhythm generates the soundtrack to the view from his window. he is enraptured by the beauty of this explosion, frozen in time. it is a transition from a star to a cloud. a transition from a caterpillar to a butterfly. a transition from synthesizer to orchestra. It is a transition from ic42 to Drakonis.

Click here to read more about the conclusion and metamorphosis of the 'ic42 experiment'.

reality: The recent image of the Butterfly nebula (taken by the Hubble telescope) inspired this. I awakened one recent morning, opened the web-browser space portal, and saw this through the window, in all its intensely chaotic beauty. Below is the actual link to the larger image, and NASA's text on it.

Thank you to everyone who participated in and listened/commented on the amazing entries in the Macjams "Space Race Challenge". It has been a blast putting this together and seeing all the creativity swirl!

ttfn,
SpaceRace Challenge, aka ic42, aka hakucho, aka Drakonis

Black Forest Dance (Classical)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:09:09 -0700

Close your eyes, and come with me. It is a warm Autumn eve in the Black Forest. There are ancient folk tales about this magical wood... how late at night it comes to life with mischievous fairies and wood nymphs. Any mortal who hears the unusual, hauntingly romantic dance music, will be enchanted, drawn into the heart of the forest, and will never return. Hush! Do you hear them? They're calling, gathering for the dance...

Extra Notes: I wanted to create an unusual dance, something that felt just a little off-kilter, strange, but catchy at the same time. I wrote a melody that switched between minor and major, and also wrote an unusual rhythmic "loping" feel between the cellos, strings, and clarinets. It is in 4/4 time, but doesn't want to be... I'm dubbing it a "faux-trot". For all of us who have delightfully quirky eternal romances. Eternal thanks to my wife who inspires me to write music, and guided and critiqued this piece so thoughtfully. She really wanted the middle section to be a full-fledged-fugue, but it is a simpler canon ("round") for now until I learn more about composition.

Dance of the Technoids ('80s Techno)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:20:10 -0700

Bouncy Electro-pop music with aliens dancing around large lava lamps (suggesting that music is literally "universal".) Reaching into my 1980's musical subconscious, I wrote a catchy "Depeche Mode"-like techno-flamenco tune, and then created a mosh pit of Technoids dancing to the music in a hyper-realistic dance hall called "The Candy Bar". Music written note by note in Harmony Assistant (www.myriad-online.com) and finished/EQed in GarageBand. Live acoustic Spanish guitar performed by Ian Beardsley. Video rendered with POV-Ray Mac (http://mac.povray.org), and assembled in iMovie. For the technically curious, there are over 1,200 lines of POV-Ray code (all written by hand in the text language, no modelers were harmed...) to create this. The 2.5 minute movie (in final anti-aliased DVD format) took 70+ continuous hours to render all the frames on an old dual 1 Ghz G4 Mac. This is my first foray into real music videos. Now available is the high-quality DVD of the music video 'Dance of the Technoids', with an extra 12+ minute "behind-the-scenes" interview with yours truly about how I wrote the music and created the 3D graphics, and a solo guitar performance by Ian.

Border Merger / Tearing Down the Waltz (Mexican Waltz)

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:15:38 -0700

Imagine a Mexican quintette playing a fast waltz. There are 3 melodies played in 3/4 time, in a sort of non-standard ABCABC (Rondo?) format. The title is a photographic/geographic/melodic play on words. There is a merging of European waltz and Mexican-sounding instrumentation.
This fourth version has an improved sampled violin, as well as the real trumpet performance from the prior version. The new violin part was created from the score-exported-MIDI by Bubowski, who tweaked & enhanced the expressiveness to work with the Garritan Personal Orchestra's violin, and sent me the resulting audio file to replace the old harsh violin sample I had in there. The great Russian jazz trumpet player Vladimir Galaktionov had graciously read my score and recorded his performance of this piece, and I had replaced the sampled trumpet with his live recorded performance. Anyone want to play the violin part live for this?
This has become a programmatic work for me, and the vision I have tried to capture in the music follows:
• [Intro] The warm evening twilight brings a light scent of jasmine across a courtyard in Southern California, and a Mexican band begins playing a waltz. A young gentleman saunters over to a lady, who is shyly swaying to the music. He asks her to dance with him, and she accepts his hand. They sway together onto the dance floor.
• [Melody 1] The dance begins with them dancing formally, with respectable distance between them. He is looking over her shoulder and leading gently, and her head is demurely bowed.
• [Melody 2-3] As the dance progresses, she gains confidence and begins to look at him, and he at her, and they dance closer.
• [Repeat Melody 1-3] Still unsure of each other, they return to the formal beginning of the dance. Again, they begin to feel the joyful warmth of each other and pull closer.
• [Modulation] Playfully, the lady pulls away from him and out into the spotlight.
• [Bridge/Melody 1] The gentleman watches as she performs her own twirling dance, just for him. He smiles and begins to clap his raised hands in time to the beat of her version of the dance.
• [Melody 1-repeat] At the end of the repeat, he steps in and they dance together with increasing flair and passion.
• [Melody 2-3] They flow together, seeing only each other. The rest of the world has melted away.
• [Finale] As the music ends, the gentleman pulls the lady close to him, then dramatically dips her to the side.
Ah, to make this a reality with a real band playing this for my wife and I to dance to...
Hardware: Eduard: Dual 1GHz G4, Vodka, 3 or 4 kisses Vladimir: 1.6Ghz PC, Cubase SX. and AKG C3000 mic ...and the internet to connect Moscow to San Diego.
Software: This was written and scored note-by-note by me, and performed with a mixture of Bubowski's "Garritan Personal Orchestra" sampled instruments (Violin), and GarageBand 2 stock instruments (bongos, acoustic guitar, acoustic bass), and Vladimir's real trumpet playing. Artwork is something I created using "The Gimp" and Photoshop and a photo of Vladimir.

Lickety Split / Caroline's Bear Rag (Ragtime)

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:24:01 -0700

This little ragtime number began life as just a snippet, written as background music for a home movie. But recently, I decided to flesh this out into a much longer song. For the hard core ragtime buffs, I know this is not quite syncopated enough to be true ragtime, but hopefully its fun and bouncy and makes you smile anyway. I had a lot of fun playing with the dynamics to make this feel animated and alive.

Chicken Recording and Disco Rap (?)

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 16:28:52 -0700

Here is a photo of our chicken, “Custard.” She started out as a not-too-famous chicken. One morning I heard her singing this amazing Wagner-like trumpet call (near the end of this recording), so I snuck out and recorded her with my video-camera, and saved the audio-recording here. Click the play button below her picture to hear her sing, a capella.

Belle Fugue (Baroque)

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 14:50:28 -0700

From my 2002 "Barrel of the Kells" CD, my original fugue-like arrangement of "Carol of the Bells" (Shchedryk), as if J.S. Bach had written it.

Ingredients: Warmth, depth, complexity, eternal romance. Dedicated to my Belle, Jeri.

Ember-Rekindled project (Ambient)

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 17:47:02 -0700

Dark Ambient crackling embers of relentless electronica. This started in 2003 as a sketch for a slow dark ambient piece and was almost forgotten. Several years later, I found the sketch, fleshed it out it, and posted on MacJams.com originally as Ember. This is the result, Ember-Rekindled. I wrote and scored this note-by-note on "Harmony Assistant" composition software, then MIDI-ported it to GarageBand 2 & chose new instruments & EQed. I created the artwork with the freeware POV-Ray 3D raytracer.

I have since offered this as an open-collaboration project, just to see how diverse Ember could become when re-envisioned by different artists. So far, there have been over 38 different versions of Ember created by different musicians. The current list of variations are available to listen to here (scroll down to the Ember section).

Kuroi (electronica)

Sun, 15 May 2005 13:43:54 -0700

It is black now. it is "kuroi" in japanese. darkness can be seen, however, only if it is illuminated by joy. if there is no happiness, then darkness is invisible. this music illuminates the darkness with small happiness. a smile traces the outline of despair.

this music attempts a new circuit path for ic42. it creates a dark twin of ray lynch. it restores balance to the world, and traces the outline of a final smile.

(Written when my father passed away.)

Ball Of Dying Electronics/BODE (electronica)

Thu, 5 May 2005 13:49:57 -0700

it is midnight of halloween. it blinks 12 at the landfill. the electric blue light awakens the dying electronics. a cracked blackberry dances slowly with an unrecognized newton, palm to palm. woofers gather around the hammond organ to boost the once-majestic bass. a shortwave radio connects the world for a short glowing skip. now the electronics are old and neglected. however, they enjoy this last ball together as the last trickle of power warms their friendship. they will soon be buried and forgotten.

please play this music for your electronics on halloween. they will smile.