This work is a collaboration between Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and myself with the aid of a reading of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem “Blame Not my Lute” as read by Basil Bunting in 1977 at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne provided by PennSound.
The concept of the piece was to attempt to combine circuit bending with orchestral instrumentation. Jukka provided 2 circuit bent tracks and 3 multilayered midi files in 113 cent, 103 cent and 89 cent tuning when rendered as circuit bent audio. I choose the tuning ( John Chalmer’s Triadic Aggregate-19 see below ) and instrumentation which consists of strings, brass, woodwinds, reeds, percussion, upright fretless jazz bass, and Chinese cymbals. Additionally I added various modulation effects to Jukka’s audio.
Jukka sends this description of how he created the music: All music, both Sega MP3 and MIDI files are algorithmic compositions based on few probability distibutions controlling a group of parameters. MP3 is made by Sega Genesis which contain Yamaha YM2612 FM-chip. The chip is controlled by a program I’ve written which manipulates directly the sound registers of the chip. MIDI files are generated by a program which produces note and duration events according few constrains and distributions, best expression I’ve heard so far is a term coined by composer/mathematician John Myhill, ‘controlled indeterminacy’.
And I put together a video with images from www.archive.org and www.wikipedia.org
John Chalmer’s tuning:
! C:\Program Files\Scala22\Triadic Scales\TriadicAggregate-19.scl
!
Triadic Aggregate-19 All 52 Harmonic Scales on same tonic
19
!
25/24
16/15
10/9
9/8
6/5
5/4
32/25
4/3
25/18
36/25
3/2
25/16
8/5
5/3
16/9
9/5
15/8
48/25
2/1
One reply on “Blame Not my Lute (a setting of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt)”
This is an important microtonal collaboration between poet, reader, composer, arranger, mix-master, videographer and scale creator. We need more of this type of collaborative effort using the tools of today to share with the world. Good job…all.