July 20, 2020

We finish our years like a sigh (Psalm 90.9 (NKJV))
We spend our years as a tale that is told (Psalm 90.9 (KJV))

Sunday, July 19. A different cemetery; a different train of thought:

Monday, July 20. WFH: DAY 96. 7.00 am: The morning light; unoccupied rooms:

8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I reviewed by commitments for the day and week ahead. For the first time this month, it felt like the academic summer ought: a movement of the mind towards not only current research but also projects in embryo. While some activities will be wound-up over the next few years, others will be seeded. 9.30 am: Studiology.

I follow Laurie Spiegel on Twitter. She has been one of the most significant contributors to the development of electronic music, both as a composer and designer of computer algorithms. Yesterday, she wrote:

Regardless of all we have each experienced as to musical genre and style, one thing the world needs from music right now is plain old fashioned beauty. These are difficult times. It needs to just plain feel good to be alive. Music can do that for people. If we can figure out how.

Laurie Spiegel, Twitter (July 20, 2020)

It’s not, perhaps, the beauty of Schoenberg, Berg, Weber, or Stockhausen that we stand in need of right now but, rather, of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, Vaughan Williams’, A Lark Ascending, and Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. The latter’s final movement contains some of the most joyous and life-affirming passages in twentieth-century western music. The composition also features an Ondes Martenot — one of the earliest electronic musical instruments.

Having generated enough processed samples of the text for the singing angels, I tentatively began to assemble them. From this point onward, the dominant mood of the composition would be established. I was under no illusion that the output would either recall a choir (heavenly or otherwise) or be beautiful in an old-fashioned sense. Rather, it would sound like a text, that had been printed, photographed, read aloud, recorded, and data-processed. Until lunchtime, I wove the samples in and out of one another. The resultant sound was rather doleful, which was at it should be for a song of angels who were attending a death bed scene.

1.30 pm: I moved the samples in and out of audibility and focus for the remainder of the afternoon, as I travelled the six-minute length of the composition. 4.30 pm: I revisited St Padarn’s Church graveyard. The grounds are far more picturesque than those of the municipal cemetery. All about are backdrops to Pre-Raphaelite paintings that never were:

7.15 pm: The evening light:

7.30 pm: My ears were too full of hearing to listen further for improvements that needed to be made to the composition. I took up writing once again.

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