After Creation

After Creation is an entry into the Vox Novus 15 Minutes of Fame competition for flute and marimba duet. Unfortunately the entry was not accepted for performance but undeterred I present to you a performance of the score rendered by Garritan Personal Orchestra. There is a bit of a story behind this piece. As family matters had reduced my composing time I had two pieces due on the same day, one for classical guitar, and another for marimba or marimba & flute duet. Being a classical guitarist I devoted my limited time to that piece since I had a clear vision of what I wanted to create and was willing to skip the other entry if needed. What happened was that I finished the guitar piece 3 days early. And then I heard Norm Harris’ masterful percussion improvisation in 7/8 time called Groove for Shabbat. http://alonetone.com/norm/tracks/groove-for-shabbat Inspired by Norm’s composition I asked him if I could have a TUBS score of a portion of the piece to let me try to translate from an almost pure percussive realm into a harmonic and melodic realm. Norm kindly replied with the score you see above these words. Using this as a template I translated the several percussive lines into melodic voices with an eye to combining them harmonically. The result is playable and available for download below.

A word about the title. Norm’s original post explained ” (That in Cuba) The number 7 is a symbol for perfection or completeness: 7 colors in a rainbow, 7 musical notes in a scale, 7 days = a week, etc. and to that end Shabbat is the Jewish name for the 7th day of the week – a day of rest after God created the Universe.

Since I was writing for real performers with “common” 12 equal instruments writing microtonally was not a possibility. However, now with a computer rendering via Garritan Personal Orchestra I can use Kraig Grady’s Centaur A 7-Cap Just Intonation tuning shown below. A small note here – a requirement of entry into the composition was that the composition could not exceed 1 minute in length. This piece is about 53 seconds long.

! C:\Cakewalk\scales\CENTAUR A 7-CAP TUNING.scl
!
kraig grady CENTAUR A 7-CAP TUNING
12
!

21/20
9/8
7/6
5/4
4/3
7/5
3/2
14/9
5/3
7/4
15/8
2/1