Clochán an Aifir or Clochán na bhFomhórach for flute, oboe, and bassoon

[Vaisvil]

Definitely bucking the pop art movement... this is some long hair stuff 1700's style (sort of)




Clochán an Aifir or Clochán na bhFomhórach or The Giant's Causeway is a composition for flute, oboe, and bassoon using John O'Sullivan's Raven Temperament version 2. The score can be found here. The piece is very lightly based on the legend of The Giant's Causeway which you can read about on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway

Legend tells of an Irish warrior Fionn mac Cumhaill, who built a causeway to Scotland. One version of the legend tells that Fionn was challenged by a Scottish giant, Benandonner. Now Benandonner was much much larger than Fionn, so he tried to think of a way out. His wife, Oonagh, came up with an ingenious idea. When Benandonner crossed the bridge looking for him, Oonagh disguised Fionn as a baby and tucked him in a cradle. When Benandonner came, Oonagh told him that Fionn was out woodcutting, but he should be back soon. She showed him 'Fionn's son'. When Benandonner saw the size of the baby, he had no desire to see the father! Benandonner fled home in terror, ripping up the Causeway behind him, so the 'enormous Finn MacCool', would not follow him.

The "causeway" legend corresponds with geological history in as much as there are similar basalt formations (a part of the same ancient lava flow) at the site of Fingal's Cave on the isle of Staffa in Scotland

more information on John O'Sullivan's tuning http://www.johnsmusic7.com/

[SwanSong]

HI . surely could not let this one go unoticed. wonderful instrumental.
and very classical sounding great job .just curious did u use software
for the music and or keyboard. either way great and surely enjoyed
cheers NEIL .

[Vaisvil]

Hi Neil, all of it was inputted by mouse. The humanization comes from the score writing software Sibelius (ver 6) and a few loudness and notated rhythmic changes. I've found that adding just a little can do a long way.

The samples were Garritan Personal Orchestra - still a good deal @ $149 (last I looked) for orchestral music.

Thank you very much for your listen and comments!

[thetworegs]

Sounds excellent Chris.......

[Farrell Jackson]

How ever you've accomplished this is astounding to me.....excellent use of the musical tools at your disposal! Plus I like the interesting and funny story for the song.

Farrell

[Vaisvil]

Thanks Reg and Farrell!

[AndyR]

Yep, sounds great

[DeificDave]

Very cool, I enjoyed this one very much, I hope to hear more.

[alfstone]

Wonderful...but can you please explain a little about your working path? It seems to understand that you write the various score parts; then assign each part to a channel, or a midi track, played by Sibelius through Garritan...am I right? 

Anyway great results, and more in general my congrats! Your music has always something different and is always an interesting listen...

Alfredo

[Vaisvil]

Thank you Andy, Dave, and Alfredo

If you look at the score each musical staff is assigned a midi channel in Sibelius and each channel an instrument in Garritan Personal Orchestra 4. The microtonal part comes in from a file I load into GPO 4.

When I input notes with the mouse I can hear the actual pitch (that is with whatever tuning ). My work flow consists of inputting a phrase or chord(s) and then playing back to hear the context and make corrections if needed. I work in a linear fashion most of the time from beginning to end. In this case I wrote the fast beginning and at the end of that section wrote part of the slow section. Then my musical problem was to combine the two as the piece evolved so it didn't sound like I just slammed two different parts together (nothing wrong with that - it just was not what I wanted.)

I've been working hard on trying to create and maintain themes. As someone once noted a few years back I can pump out a lot of notes but I was poor at unifying my music into a whole. Since I don't usually like straight repetition in the classical music I write I have been leaning very hard on imitation, transposition and transformation in an attempt to unify. Along the way I've learned some neat tricks like taking a melody and stacking chords out of 3 or 4 note segments and of course taking chords and making a melody from them. I used that technique (and layering) to roughly double the length of this:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmt3TghiCKs

Usually when I write out music like this my time frame increases from hours or days to weeks or months. I usually deal with much more detail especially since I mostly discard large scale direct repetition as an option.