There's a huge tradition within the Western art music tradition of using the German letters which stand for notes to spell out composers names in musical motifs - BACH ( b, a, c, b natural) for --um--Bach & DSCH ( d, e flat, c, b natural) for Shostakovich and a wider practice of embedding extra musical references -to lovers & the like - not into the *sounding music as perceived* but into the notation..almost a kind of sympathetic magic...
Berg's work is apparently chock full of this wider kind of reference - http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa070398.htm The 'music text composition generator' is an amusing one liner but of course there's a coding problem in that, OK, some sort of correspondance can be easily set up between the letters of the alphabet and the 12 degrees of the chromatic scale but there isn't even an obvious second *independent* axis within a text which could consistently generate a rhythmic component, let alone any of the other dimensions of data traditionally encoded in Western notation... michael --- On Fri, 1/30/09, Rob Myers <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Rob Myers <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] P22 Music Text Composition Generator. > To: "NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity" > <[email protected]> > Date: Friday, January 30, 2009, 12:57 PM > On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:39 PM, marc garrett > <[email protected]> wrote: > > The idea was basic and simple-every letter > > of the alphabet was assigned to a note on a scale. > > Didn't Mozart use something like this for commissions? > I don't mean > the dice game named after him, I'm sure I heard > somewhere that he had > a letter-to-note-sequence system. > > Grr. I wish I kept better references. ;-) > > - Rob. > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
