Complex, simple, objective, subjective

Music blogger Kyle Gann says:

“Of course, the Swift Boat Graduates always have a point: a lot of complex things go on in the brain in response to a Satie Gymnopedie, and ultimately the Encyclopedia Britannica is just a record of billions of subjective impressions upon which doubt could be cast. Those are interesting, important issues to ponder, but they are rather divorced from everyday life, and few of us can afford to leave everyday life for long. Subjective, objective, complex, simple, are all comparative terms whose absolute endpoints lie outside human experience; and if you’re going to swallow up those words into their intellectually derived absolutes, then we still need other words for the everyday meanings those words hold in conversation. What’s wrong with the Swift Boat Graduates is that they sometimes wax fascistic about disallowing naive uses of their pet words, as though once you’ve discovered a more sophisticated concept for the word, what the naive use once referred to disappears. This tendency threatens to bring musical discourse down to a grad-school level. Part of intellectual maturity is knowing when the exalted meaning is appropriate and when the quotidian meaning is just fine.
(…) if we’re going to connect the music we love with the world we live in, it’s not helpful to get in the habit of justifying ourselves with a special, circumscribed vocabulary. That way dishonesty lies.”‘

(I have no idea about what a “Swift Boat Graduate” is.)

Convallaria

Short meditation music from 2003. (Maybe more suitable as a commercial or other media jingle. Certainly not meant as concert music for string orchestra, at least not in this short form).

Copy and paste music

Following a discussion about this article I decided to put some of my old “compositions” with loops online, and I also posted two newer pieces to my site www.maritune.com.

The three first things are made with Roland DoReMix, which I got in a software bundle when I bought the SoundCanvas soundcard around 1995. DoReMix had presequenced 4-bar midi loops in different styles, which could be copied and pasted on a chart on the screen.

The two newest files are made with iLife GarageBand and Apple Loops. To the short example called “A Different Code” I added a couple of simple tracks which I played on the computer keys into the program.

The piece called “Exdream” is mixed in GarageBand (this afternoon) around an audio file from a midi recording I did with the Soundcanvas sounds on my first computer. I honestly think the piece stinks, mostly because the recording of my improvisation on “church organ” and “taiko drums”, etc, isn’t very interesting music, and certainly not a good performance or sequence job. However, I wanted to say something with this music, about life, folk music, pop sounds, attitudes and everything. Have a nice evening!

Yin & Yang

I saw in my stats that someone printed the score to the piano version of my piece Yin & Yang yesterday, so if there are any more fans of my music out there, here is a link to the page where the score is published, and an mp3 of a midi demo! Another demo version can be found at YouTube (see below), with the leadsheet and mp3 published on SibMus.

String trio arrangement

Allemande BWV 836 (arr. by MaLj for string trio) (1720) by Joh. Seb. Bach & Wilh. Fr. Bach

This “Allemande” in G minor (BWV 836) is from the music album Johann Sebastian Bach prepared for his eldest son. The “Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach” was started around 1720, when the boy was ten years old. It is assumed that father and son collaborated in the composing of this keyboard (harpsichord, clavichord, etc) piece.

I have arranged this for string trio: Violin I, Violin II or Viola, and Violoncello. There are separate parts to print from the SibeliusMusic.com page, too, and the middle part is available both in notation for Violin II and for Viola.

The time signature (my edition) is 8/8 here, instead of the more common C or 4/4, but the tempo is counted in half notes from the start.