"Harpsichord Solo (Poulenc Remix)" [2.9 MB .mp3]
Made these harpsichord samples a few years ago, from a vinyl version of Francis Poulenc's Concert champêtre. This remix includes some passages "straight" except for tempo changes and a middle section where the sampler does its thing. I don't own the rights, fair use, etc. (Poulenc himself was a known "borrower.") This hybrid exists as a thought-experiment-hopefully-with-entertainment-value.
The End of the Story (Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith Vol 1)
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Faded Sun Trilogy Omnibus, C.J. Cherryh (good, but the ebook is riddled with typos)
Resurgence, C.J. Cherryh (am sticking with her Foreigner series even though nothing happens in this or the previous installment)
The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake (not what I expected -- these books have been described as a "fantasy of manners")
The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley
Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock
The Eye of the Heron, Ursula K. Le Guin
The Beginning Place, Ursula K. Le Guin
Worlds of Exile and Illusion, Ursula K. Le Guin (three early sf books by her)
The Genocides, Thomas M. Disch
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor
Shōgun, James Clavell
C.S. Forester's Hornblower books (never read these)
Various series novels by Alastair Reynolds, Linda Nagata, Tony Hillerman, Arthur Upfield, Ngaio Marsh, Georges Simenon, Colin Dexter, etc etc
"Moon Joker" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]
My second experiment in converting a lengthy atonal work into a short tonal work. The first cut up maestro was Stockhausen; this one is the original Ahr-nuld (Schoenberg).
I took snippets from a vinyl version of Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21, then looped, layered, and timestretched them onto a 120 bpm timeline/grid.
This is a raw, possible first draft. Normally if something feels missing percussion or reverb would be added. Here the clips were left unenhanced, including all the room tone, artifacts, turntable noise, and hiss from increasing gain on very quiet passages. Hours went into manually de-clicking the loudest pops from the vinyl, but no de-noising or de-crackling software was used (it's expensive!). The remaining noise then becomes part of the piece, in some cases adding rhythmic interest without the need for extraneous percussion.
In his liner notes for the Nonesuch edition of Pierrot Lunaire, Charles Wuorinen describes the work as a culmination of Schoenberg's "contextually atonal" works before the arrival of the composer's 12-tone system. Wuorinen's definition of contextual atonality isn't very clear -- he seems to be saying that each work has its own rules of tonality, as opposed to the Western canon's rules up to that point (1912). He says that Schoenberg made intuitive, ad hoc choices in the arrangement of notes and phrases, causing the music to be unpredictable from minute to minute, while unified by the poetic text and the organization of the work into sections.
Nevertheless, individual runs of notes are quite musical, when de- or re-contextualized. I made 24 clips of varying lengths, and ended up using most of them. Phrases from different sections "stacked" surprisingly well -- that is, shared the same key signature without having to transpose notes.
Why do this? Software makes tonal experiments possible without having to hire musicians. And the noise component adds new timbres and content. Ultimately, though, it's low grade revenge porn.
"Bloggregation" of jpegs of this single artist's work, featured on classical music covers (from Discogs, except Feininger Impulse, via Bezos). Four of these images are duplicates, but the reproduction quality is, er, variable, so they are included as well. Most of the recordings are of 20th Century modernist composers; Feininger himself made music and is featured on a couple of releases. Picasso/Braque-style Cubism comes immediately to mind in the style of these paintings; however, Feininger was an American, who exhibited in shows of German Expressionist movements while studying in Germany. American Precisionists such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler also could be invoked. Clearly if Feininger did not exist it would be necessary for modernist music LP cover-designers to invent him. The paintings set an "angular," "analytical" tone for the music, or vice versa.
