My Little Grundgestalts

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“The word 'Algebra' comes from the Arabic: الجبر, romanized: al-jabr, lit. 'reunion of broken parts, bonesetting' from the title of the early 9th century book “cIlm al-jabr wa l-muqābala” “The Science of Restoring and Balancing” by the Persian mathematician and astronomer al-Khwarizmi. In his work, the term al-jabr referred to the operation of moving a term from one side of an equation to the other.” (Wikipedia)

Not only al-Khwarizmi coined the word algebra — his name gave origin also to “algorithm”! We really owe so very much to this Arabic mathematician...

“Al-jabr” is indeed the result of a reunion of spurious parts provided by a Steinway D piano, assorted Arabic percussions (darbuka, riq, etc.), and Rickenbacker bass (plain and “treated” with various effects; kindly lent to me by dear friend Jan). The whole emerging from those parts is a minimal piece. Surprisingly, at least to me, is the fact that I had not decided to write one such composition. The piece wanted it thus. Sometimes I feel more like a midwife than a composer...

The piece is available

Share with me your opinions, if you like! Thanks in advance,

栄屯

A couple of years ago I wrote an album called “Les Fleurs du Mal”. despite its title, that album is NOT dedicated to Baudelaire's famous collection of poems — rather, it proposes pieces inspired by the manga 惡の華 (“Aku no Hana”, that is “The Flowers of Evil”), by Oshimi Shūzō.

So far I have posted three pieces from that album. This is a fourth one, called “Saeki”, as one of the dramatis personae of that manga. The video is given by the first scene of “Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens”,

“a 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a vampire who preys on the wife ([Ellen, interpreted by] Greta Schröder) of his estate agent (Gustav von Wangenheim) and brings the plague to their town” (Wikipedia)

The tragic figure of Ellen, and her utmost sensibility, led me to the present association with Nanako Saeki. If you read the manga, my guess is you're going to understand why.

Please note that Greta Schröder was actually born as Margarethe Schröder.

If you like this music, you might consider to listen to the whole album on #bandcamp:

Les Fleurs Du Mal: https://eidon.bandcamp.com/album/les-fleurs-du-mal

The video is on my #youtube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@eidonveda, at https://youtu.be/GUYRfzjA91k:

Murnau's film was downloaded from https://archive.org/details/nosferatu_eine_symphonie_des_grauens, Public Domain Mark 1.0 Creative Commons License publicd omain

Post also on facebook.

Die Schauspielerin Greta Schroeder, 1919. Ernst Reichardt (gest. 1932) – Privatfotographie Ernst Reichardt. Public domain.

Thank you for taking the time to check my work out!

This is “フラグマー 1” (”Furaguma I”), an algorithmic piece based on a compositional approach that I called Wohlgestaltete Komposition. It is a hybrid process, in which machine and man cooperate. In a nutshell:

  • I identify musical quanta that represent initial configurations for a game simulator.
  • When fed into the simulator, those “μQuanta” produce 3-voice music fragments. I select the μQuanta that produce fragments that I consider of interest, and I compose them together.
  • I consider the music emerging from the combined fragments, and I operate modifications in the order and quantity of μQuanta in order to accentuate musical aspects that enhance the overall musical quality (according to my own perception) and to dampen aspects that I consider detrimental to that subjective concept of quality.
  • I continue the process by disrupting the selected μQuanta by flipping / adding / subtracting certain elements. Those disruptions in some cases aim at producing more “balanced” initial configurations, such that the corresponding games and music fragments last longer. In some other cases they may be purely random.
  • I include the disrupted μQuanta in the ongoing compositional process, and continue to build up the “piece” until its overall shape and contents assume what I arbitrarily recognize as a unique “identity”.

I refer to the overall selection of μQuanta in a piece such as “Furaguma I” as to “the Grundgestalt of Furaguma I”.

In fact, the term “Wohlgestaltete” means “well-shaped”, but it's actually a reference to the above process of selection of μQuanta that shape up the piece by defining its “basic form” — its Grundgestalt.

When time allows, I will write a paper describing the Wohlgestaltete Komposition. I would appreciate it very much if you would have suggestions regarding possible target journals. Thank you!

Credits

A curiosity

Comment about Mi 75 “One of the challenges in sorting out the fragments from Mi 75 is that the scriptorium seems to have a rather casual attitude to ruling – two pages of the same leaf can have different writing space, and the columns may be of different widths. Lat. fragm. 896, 1-4 are related to Mi 75 through initials, pigment and parchment, but differ in scribe, music scribe and format. Still, the scribe seems to be imitating the main scribe of Mi 75, and may therefore have collaborated on the same book.”

...and finally:

#μQuanta #WohlgestalteteKomposition. #Grundgestalt #GenerativeMusic #AlgorithmicComposition

Hi!

Let me share with you my latest work and video:

I called it “euqinacèM” (”Mécanique” read in reverse). That's because it is basically a Dada xenochrony based on the famous experimental short “Ballet Mécanique” played in reverse — from its last frame to its first. I sped up the video to 64.58fps, and then mixed my newest composition, “Gohachi”, with it.

I found the result truly surprising! Especially when you consider that I composed the music without considering to use it as I did. In the end, as Don Preston says in “200 Motels,” it looks like “Whatever I mix... is irrelevant... to THE RESULT!”

...I wonder what Frank would have thought of my little Dada meta-experiment....

And I'd love to hear your opinion!

The Wikipedia article about “Ballet Mécanique” now briefly mention my score:

Gohachi is available on my #bandcamp: https://eidon.bandcamp.com/track/gohachi

If you like my work, please follow me on bandcamp via https://eidon.bandcamp.com/follow_me, or on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ0UIBDZEYlvn8thxv3aOxw

Thank you!

Why do I compose music? And why do I experiment with generative compositions? I think I know now.

It's for the thrill.

The thrill that I get when certain magic combinations and ideas work beyond what I could ever have anticipated.

That is what happened with this work. Let me explain a little.I started to work on it two years ago. My game simulator provided me with three voices. I did something new. I only focused on one of them — the one corresponding to the cards the players were accumulating “on the table” as a result of their moves. I had the idea that that voice was a theme. A theme for a fugue.I started playing with it. For some reason, I decided that I was not ready yet. That piece required some time — it had to “leaven up.”

A few days ago I finally decided to focus on this idea once more. I listened to it. I understood what it wanted me to do. I applied the voice in new ways, as I was instructed to do. From that voice.And from the sum of its parts — actually being the very same, repeated part — this “Fugestalt” (portmanteau of “Fuge” and “Gestalt”) finally emerged.And I finally realized why I compose and why I experiment.

The video took me a lot of time to complete. It uses chunks that I extracted from the video “2019 Mount Robson Marathon”. I wrote a software that combines the chunks following the voices of this fugue. I hope you'll like it.

The song can be downloaded in lossless format from my bandcamp.

Please follow me on #bandcamp, via https://eidon.bandcamp.com/follow_me, on youtube, and facebook.

Best, Eidon.

Railway Tracks is the name I gave to my latest album, which can be downloaded (for free or for a coffee) from my Bandcamp, here.

The album includes 10 tracks (9 songs and an alternate take). It differs considerably from my previous albums, because there I mostly used computer sounds, while here I also played my basses and guitars.

On a runaway train

One of the tracks — actually the one that gave the album its title — is called “On a runaway train”. It's a track on 10/8 (why do I always end up using unconventional time signatures?!) Here I used two beautiful Turkish instruments: the Quanun and the Oud, on top of which I layered Contrabass, Piano, Percussions, and Electric Guitar (the latter is played by me.)

Syrian oud made by Abdo Nahat in 1921. By Tdrivas – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66957987

Video is “Ride on a Runaway Train”, by Lyman H. Howe (1921).

The track appears twice on the album. An alternate take is available, for Piano, Vibraphone, and Percussions:

Fractal mold

Second track on the album is called “Fractal Mold”:

It's an instrumental, and yet I wrote lyrics for this song — one day I will record them. Here they are:

I waste my time at the bus station I blow my time in a train And then here I'm with in a packed pod Once again and again with in a box Sitting like cogs, right, mechanical cogs that need to be placed with in a grinder to produce yet another heavy duty and grander mechanical prison for others who need to produce what needs to be made & packed & sold & mold for ever a-gain in a fractal mold

Bo, Ed, and Mick

There follow three songs dedicated to three imaginary railway workers, Mick Robase, Bo Leroy, and Ed Downtune. The first one, “Mick Robase”, I composed it on my friend Paul's Microbass. What a lovely instrument!

Mick Robase: Dedicated to my friend Paul De Coninck, whose Microbass you can hear in this track!

Bo Leroy: a piece for electric guitar, vibraphone, acoustic bass, and koto. The picture is my photo of a murale that can be found in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

As for the third guy (“Downtune Ed”), his story is simple: I was doing some exercises on my electric guitar. I had downtuned the low E string to E flat in order to play The Police's “Roxanne” in fingerstyle — trying to play the notes of Sting's bass guitar and Andy's guitar at the same time. After that, I decided to “play” a little with my downtuned guitar. I wanted to try harmonics with it. Soon I came up with the guitar theme of this song. From there, I added rhythmic guitar and a bass-like part also played on guitar. On top of that I added computer-based drums and piano.

Vinnie

Then comes “Vincent”, a song dedicated to a certain painter from The Netherlands :–)

Looks like one of Vincent's paintings right? :–)

Toccata

“Toccata” is the next song. It's a neo-classical tracks, mixing traditional instruments like the harpsichord with electric bass:

Aldo and Jimi

Two Grundgestalts follow, dedicated to two very different geniuses: Aldo Clementi and Jimi Hendrix

Concluding... notes

If you like this music, subscribe to my #bandcamp via this link: you will be notified each time I post a new track! Thank you!

A purple haze of planets Or maybe molecules? The very big, the very little, Are they so different?

Does it matter, after all, if matter is matter'ial, Or not at all?

Full, hollow, within, without, Convexes and concaves, Silences and shouts!

Where lies the truth, How false's my doubt? As late as I know I'll tell you more about.

— By and © Eidon, Eidon at tutanota.com

A few days ago my friend Paul lent me a beautiful instrument — a microbass. I have two bass guitars but, I don't know, playing that microbass was the best.

Halfway guitar, halfway bass... probably that's why I like it, 'cause I myself am something in between a guitarist and a bass player. The fact is, when I play it, I get lots and lots of musical ideas. Some are bad and get discarded, some are good and haunt me down until I yield and turn them into music pieces.

That's what happened with “Mick Robase”: I had a first idea, then a second one that matched well with the first...

So I recorded them and then I started improvising on top of both. A few little fragments made sense, at least to me, and I trashed the rest. Then I started thinking of a structure, and of other parts, and other instruments. I wrote two percussion lines, and added a doublebass part. I added a piano part — at first a simple melody, then something a little more complex;

and that was it :–)

I hope you like the result! It's on my Bandcamp and on youtube:

“Mick Robase” is by Eidon, Eidon@tutanota.com. Music and pictures © Eidon, All rights reserved.

“Mick Robase”'s video was created with txt2srt & feed-povray.

If you like my music, you can download it free of charge from my #bandcamp: https://eidon.bandcamp.com

And if you REALLY REALLY like my music, you can follow me there via https://eidon.bandcamp.com/follow_me 🎇 🦆 🎶 🎸 🎆 !

...Lysardgig is a lysergic, obsessive, psychedelic, minimalist Ostinato. It is based on only two voices, one of which, the bass, is stubbornly repeated. A slow trend, like abandoning oneself, canceling oneself. Written in one go, last night. Yes, a nocturnal piece – a dark blue piece. Lysardgig Yggdrasil.

Here it is on #peertube

as well as on #FunkWhale

On #Bandcamp you may find the song in lossless format and the whole album that I'm writing.

Photo by Josh Sorenson from Pexels

Lysardgig was composed on October 2 2020. © Eidon (Eidon at tutanota.com). All rights reserved.

AI-fragile, or 『愛フラジャイル』in Japanese, is an algorithmic composition that I wrote a couple of years ago.

Why such a strange name? Well, at the time I was learning about the concept of antifragility introduced by Professor Nicholas Taleb in his book “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder”. Antifragile things are those that strive to survive and learn from crisis. I liked that concept very much! The idea of things having “a thirst for life” seemed to me very human and very clever too.

Now, the Japanese term『愛欲』(“ai-yoku”) means precisely this: “an eternal thirst for life”.

On top of this, the “Ai”『愛』kanji is pronounced the same way as a feminine Japanese given name, 『あい』, which of course can also e interpreted as a reference to Artificial Intelligence. The old manga “Video Girl Ai” 『電影少女』 couples nicely the above-mentioned ideas.

All the above was becoming a Maelström of ideas in my head; to boil it down a little, I decided to make use of the mentioned concepts by creating a musical composition.

So here's “AI-fragile” 『愛フラジャイル』, a piece in three parts:

  • The first one is for contrabass and percussions. I called it “愛”, “Ai”
  • The second is “フラジャイル”, i.e. “fragile”. It is played by tubular bells, African percussions, double bass and piano.
  • The third part, “AI-fragile” 『愛フラジャイル』, is for Taiko drums, koto, celesta, melodic tom, drums, and pizzicato strings.

I hope you'll like it! If so, “like” my page, please, and follow me on #bandcamp at eidon.bandcamp.com

Note: I read of the concept of 『愛欲』, “aiyoku”, in the book “Il pensiero giapponese classico” by Massimo Raveri.

#musiccomposition #algorithmicmusic #愛欲 #antifragile #NicholasTaleb #EidonVeda

Confucius said: – Elevate yourselves with odes, strengthen yourselves with rituals, complete yourself with music. (Confucius, Lun Yü (The Analects), Book 4, Chapter VIII T'Ai-Po, 192)

] (Picture by Unknown – This file has been extracted from another file: Ancientchineseinstrumentalists.jpg, Public Domain).

A man who is not charitable, what will he make out of music? (Confucius, Lun Yü (The Analects), Book 2, Chapter III Pa I, 43)

When he was in the kingdom of Ch'i, Confucius heard shao music: for three months [while studying it, he was so absorbed that] he did not perceive the taste of meat. “I never imagined,” he said, “that the music would go that far.” (Confucius, Lun Yü (The Analects), Book 4, Chapter VII Shu Êrh, 160)

AI-fragile 『愛フラジャイル』 is © Eidon (Eidon@tutanota.com). All rights reserved.

Okonai is the rite of marriage between the rice fields and the mountain, which represent the world organized by man and the Absolutely Free world of Nature:

“There is an ancient rite, the okonai (行ない), which clearly expresses, in the symbolic language of the ceremony, the cultural perception of sacred space, based on overcoming the opposition between the two dimensions of the ecosystem that characterizes daily village life: the rice fields and the mountain. On the night of the first of the year, the village heads of households climb up to the slopes of the mountain. On the edge of the forest they draw a sacred perimeter. The tōya 当屋, the religious and social leader of the village, enters it, holding two wooden statues representing one the mountain goddess (Yama-no-kami, 山の神) and the other the god of the rice field (Ta-no-kami, 田の神). The tōya joins the two statues symbolizing their sexual union, pours sake, the symbol of semen, on their sexes, and declares them to be newlyweds. Everyone then presents offerings to the deities and the officiant reads norito 祝詞, a prayer formula. Sake is then distributed to each person, and the offerings are divided and consumed. The village chief makes possible the union between the deities who define the two different spaces, of the cultivated and the wild, and seals the harmony between humans and nature. The dichotomy of these economically and culturally distinct worlds is not perceived as a rigid opposition, a distinction that denies any possibility of an exchange relationship; it is expressed in the terms of a necessary complementarity. Everything in this ritual is mediation: mediation of spatial patterns because the ritual takes place at the boundary point between the last rice fields and the forest. And mediation of time, because the ceremony marks the transition from one year to the next, between the cultivation cycle that has passed and the one that is to begin; it is the last hours of the night when the rite begins and, when it ends, it is dawn.”

(Massimo Raveri, “Classical Japanese Thought,” Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, ISBN 9788806165871).

Two worlds becoming one; the transition from night to day, from the old to the new, from the mystical to the carnal: all this struck me in no small measure. I then thought of writing a piece of music dedicated to this propitiatory rite. And so here is Okonai, an algorithmic composition generated from the two seed strings “tanokami” and “yamanokami.” It can be downloaded from my #bandcamp here. I hope you're going to enjoy it!

The photos, so beautiful in my opinion, are by Kanemori.

#Japan #Shinto #OriginalMusic #AlgorithmicComposition #Grundgestalt #Eidon

“Vi è un rito antico, l’okonai (行ない), che esprime con chiarezza, nel linguaggio simbolico della cerimonia, la percezione culturale dello spazio sacro, fondata sul superamento dell’opposizione fra le due dimensioni dell’ecosistema che caratterizza la vita quotidiana del villaggio: le risaie e la montagna. La notte del primo dell’anno, i capifamiglia del villaggio salgono fino alle pendici della montagna. Sul limitare della foresta essi tracciano un perimetro sacro. Il tōya当屋, il capo religioso e sociale del villaggio, vi entra, tenendo in mano due statue di legno che rappresentano una la dea della montagna (Yamanokami, 山の神) e l’altra il dio della risaia (Tanokami, 田の神). Il tōya congiunge le due statue simboleggiando la loro unione sessuale, versa sui loro sessi del sake, simbolo del seme, e li dichiara sposi. Tutti allora presentano alle divinità le offerte e l’officiante legge norito祝詞, una formula di preghiera. Il sake è quindi distribuito a ognuno, le offerte sono spartite e consumate. Il capo del villaggio rende possibile l’unione fra le divinità che definiscono i due diversi spazi, del coltivato e del selvatico, e suggella l’armonia fra gli uomini e la natura. La dicotomia di questi mondi economicamente e culturalmente distinti non è percepita come un’opposizione rigida, una distinzione che nega qualsiasi possibilità di rapporto di scambio; essa si esprime nei termini di una necessaria complementarietà. Tutto in questo rito è mediazione: mediazione degli schemi spaziali perché il rito si svolge nel punto di confine fra le ultime risaie e la foresta. E mediazione del tempo, perché la cerimonia segna il passaggio da un anno all’altro, tra il ciclo di coltivazione che è trascorso e quello che deve iniziare; sono le ultime ore della notte quando il rito comincia e, quando finisce, è l’alba.”

From Massimo Raveri, “Il pensiero giapponese classico”, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, ISBN 9788806165871.

Image by かねのり 三浦 from pixabay.

Music © Eidon. All rights reserved.

If you like this music you might consider following on my bandcamp

My blog collects a few of my Grundgestalts.