Apologies for the lack of a blog post last week, I was busy with homework and errands. With at least 4 major projects to tackle this semester, there's a lot to get done, and unfortunately this blog will have to take lower priority until the end of the semester.
Over the last two weeks, I've been working on fleshing out the musical details that I want to put in the sections. Coming up with new musical material and reworking the old material is a pretty interesting process- I found that I could keep a lot of the vocal lines and refit them to the new music I have been working on, creating a whole new atmosphere for the scenes I originally envisioned. On top of that, I've been working on thinking about movement within each scene and how they flow from one to another, which ensures that the scenes don't feel too flat and 'going nowhere'- which is another problem I realized I had with my old drafts.
Currently, composition is in progress proper for Scene 0, and the professor has suggested a very interesting phenomenon for me to model the movement off of: the Shephard Tone, which feels like it is constantly ascending (or descending) but really going nowhere. The general idea certainly fits Atlant's sense of being unmoored and lost- and I think I've come up with a good motive to experiment with. I'll have to record an audio sample and put it up here when I get the chance...
Over in musicology-land, meanwhile, I've been finally getting into reading Graeme Boone's Patterns in Play. At the moment, I've made it through the Introduction, which contains the summary of problems surrounding text underlay (primarily, variance in texting across different manuscripts, corrupt text, and most importantly, untexted melismas1), and different solutions that attempt to solve these problems. As Boone has found, all of the solutions involve making assumptions about compositional (or editorial) processes that are either not backed up by contemporary practice, or sometimes dismissive of the possibilities open to 15th century composers. (One particular pet peeve is the idea that composers did not consider the text much when setting the music aside from formal concerns- an idea implied by one of the solutions2 mentioned in Boone's rundown.) With various solutions and their shortcomings briefly mapped out, Boone then goes on to offer his own solution: a hypothetical model of text setting, based off of the correlations between mensural units and syllables within the lines of a text. It's pretty interesting to see how it will resolve the problems of text underlay, so I will be making my way through at least some of the chapters next week.
Joplin and Marshall's Swipsey Cake Walk, arranged for recorders by David Kemp and performed by Thomas Dawkins. Never thought I'd see a recorder cover of Joplin, but there's a first for everything.
1. Graeme M. Boone, "Introduction," in Patterns in Play: A Model for Text Setting in the Early French Songs of Guillaume Dufay (University of Nebrasks Press, 1999), 2-5.↩
2. Boone, "Introduction", 11.↩