Thursday, November 20, 2008

Simply Supernova

Another original composition by me!


This was an experiment in form since, normally, my music tends to be sort of without form. Erik Satie was accused of composing mostly formless and thus "pointless" music for most of his life, and he responded to his critics by writing his “Mouvements En Forme De Poire” or “Movements In the Form of a Pear.” But then he also took this criticism to heart and enrolled in music school as an old man to learn once and for all how to write “proper” music. Likewise, although I haven’t (for the most part) considered form to be very important in my own music, I am not completely disinterested in it.

Simply Supernova is made up of a few old ideas I had never been able to do much with. I thought the main bit, the relaxing arpeggiated stuff, might one day be developed into something long and carefully crafted with many changes and clever parts, but I never could hear in my imagination what those parts would sound like. Eventually, I decided that even being short and simple, it was still good enough to me not to waste so I plugged it into a formula resembling rounded binary form and filled in the rest. That works out to something like Intro>A>A2>Bridge>B>B2>Bridge>B3>1/2A>Outro

One of my favorite songs ever, “Innuendo” by Queen, uses something like that to string all of its crazy parts together. I thought such a thing could be a great tool for stringing together my own strange ideas. So, this song is essentially to “Innuendo” what Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” is to the Beatles’ “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” if you follow my meaning. Fun stuff.

The "guitar" 'part is the explosion in an otherwise vast, empty space. I couldn’t just have created such a place without something happening within it. It’s the supernova, that part, followed by a great miracle of creation. That idea is familiar to the Sim Earth song and lots of old religious music from centuries ago.

Ultimately, it was great fun to do and provided an opportunity to try all kinds of new things.