Name: Totality by Delta Changeling
Duration: 2 min 22 s
Description: I wrote this fanfare years ago in college, after seeing the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. Heavy Star Trek DS9 influence here. I wanted to capture that feeling of seeing a hole in the sky where the sun used to be, that awe and wonder with a touch of fear. Composed in MuseScore 2 in 2018, audio rendered later in MuseScore 4.

This track is perfectly self-explanatory, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Oh Come On

Slint's _Spiderland_ was an album that shook my foundations as a college student. It's a legendary album that was instrumental in launching the indie rock movement. Their previous (and only other) full-length album, _Tweez_, was dull and unremarkable. It was an unfocused, chaotic effort, and while that works for some bands, it didn't work for this group.

Spiderland is the complete opposite: focused, intense, and stripped away of almost anything extraneous. Vocals rarely rise above a whisper. It's a masterclass in building tension.

I was always fond of this particular song for its relentless downstrummed guitars, unaccompanied by drums, and a major third interval that somehow sounds more unsettling than most minor thirds or tritones. And listening it to it recently, I figured it might be a cool experiment to orchestra-fy it.

Like I always say, I don't think this process makes the song any deeper or somehow "elevates" it. There's a sense of scale, of hugeness, that an orchestra brings that is hard to replicate elsewhere. The challenge is that this is a song about one person's isolation, so I needed to have it feel intimate at times too. The way the song builds itself up and takes itself apart helps a lot here.

Support the original artist! _Spiderland_ is an incredible album, and almost every song is a standout. Buy it here: https://slint.bandcamp.com/album/spiderland-remastered

Photo by Josh Hild: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-crossing-a-pedestrian-lane-in-a-city-street-at-night-3333923/

Don, Aman - Orchestral version (Slint remix)

Live Modular set in Cambridge for Patchwork 001. 😎

Patchwork 001 [Live @ ZUZU Middle East]

Hungarian/Austrian composer György Ligeti was known for pushing boundaries in music. He's composed pieces of music for 100 metronomes, he's done (weird) string quartets, (weird) operas... and yet everything he did has this heart to it. It's far more aesthetic and listenable than the serial music his contemporaries were putting out. His music, for lack of a better word, had a real _soul_ to it.

Ligeti's best known work is his Requiem, its second movement of which was made famous as the Monolith music in Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrik found that Ligeti's Requiem sounded simultaneously ancient and futuristic, which was the perfect companion to the alien monolith whose appearance the piece accompanied.

I showed Requiem to a friend of mine, who was more versed in the traditional classical music. He boggled. "Who would want to be buried to _this_?" he asked incredulously. "Someone who doesn't want to be dead anymore," I replied.

But this piece is not the Requiem, it's Musica Ricerata, one of Ligeti's earlier pieces, composed in the early '50s when he was lecturing at the Budapest Academy of Music, and still searching for his "sound." The full piece spans 11 movements, varying wildly in tone from creepy to jaunty. It was originally composed for solo piano, but there are rearrangements for other instruments, by Ligeti himself and others, floating around there. Add this one to the mix, I guess.

The first movement is mostly made up of a single note (technically a single "pitch class," but I'll keep it simple here) at varying octaves, with a second note in thrown in at the end as a jump scare. The second goes to two notes with a third jump scare note. He expands the number of notes/pitch classes by one with each movement.

Like the Requiem, it's the second movement of this piece that's best-known from a Kubrick movie. In this case, the film is Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final work. Yes, the bit with the piano banging on two adjacent notes (with a third one providing the aforementioned jump scare).

My original vision for this piece was far grander. I wanted to do all 11 movements in various rock/pop genres, switching seamlessly in a Bungle/Estradasphere style. But I settled on just the first two movements, as I realized those were the ones I was most excited about. 

Because it's just the first two movements, I felt I had a little more liberty to take license with the piece than I otherwise would have. Without that big 11-movement arc and the constraint of adding pitches, I felt more comfortable adding some power chords into the second movements. That suits this adaptation better, and without the other nine movements present, it doesn't really mess with the grand arc.

I also took the climactic D in the first movement and "Bunglefied" the chord. I wanted it to sound a bit more dramatic. Then, I changed the big chord at the end of the second movement from a G to the same Bunglefied D. I felt that gave this adaptation good continuity and closure.

Like most of the music available on this page, I feel that this is one of the dumbest things I have ever done, and yet I feel pretty excited about it. I'm glad I did this.

Here's all 11 movements of the original piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkKV0Ze1Z6M

Photo by Bryan Geraldo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macro-photography-of-piano-586415/

Musica Ricerata, first and second movement - Loud version (György Ligeti)

I wrote this fanfare years ago in college, after seeing the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. Heavy Star Trek DS9 influence here. I wanted to capture that feeling of seeing a hole in the sky where the sun used to be, that awe and wonder with a touch of fear. Composed in MuseScore 2 in 2018, audio rendered later in MuseScore 4.

Totality

Delta Changeling

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