homesick child

Living in the Netherlands for four years has taken a toll on my mental well-being. There are some obvious aspects of the Netherlands which are difficult to overcome for a person for example from such place as Ostrava, my hometown. In this piece, I have musically explored and compared the most obvious difference – the topography and architecture, which result in quite specific panoramic views.

The initial inspiration for this piece came from Claude Vivier’s 1980 composition Lonely Child. The intent was to revisit his technique of the harmonic movements of the orchestra with the use of symmetrical mathematical addition of frequencies. A kind of a half-ring modulation, using just the addition. I wanted to explore using full-on “orchestral ring modulation”. That would mean not only adding frequencies but also subtracting.

But to do that, first I needed a melodic line. Coming back to living in the Netherlands and missing my motherland, I used the panorama of my hometown as a graphical template for the melody (hence the title).

The original photo used as a template:

Upon which I drew a line following the horizon:

Which I then directly applied to a musical staff:

And wherever the line crossed a position of a potential note, I put the note with the corresponding duration into an actual score.

Upon listening to the result, I have parted from my original idea of using ring modulation, since the result was already musically very colourful and alive. Ring modulation would make it simply too busy.

To fulfil the contrast and paint the full picture of what I miss in the Netherlands, the second sentence of the composition is a Dutch panorama made in the same process:

I deliberately didn’t choose a scale, the lack of key signature in the score doesn’t mean it’s in the key of C, rather that it’s in no key. I chose the adequate notes based on the position of the line on the staff, so all the semitones should be present at some point. When it comes to transcription of a visual score or sonification of any kind of data, I often find it disappointing when the composer chooses a specific scale and suddenly it doesn’t sound like what the original source suggest. It is the freedom of this artistic choice that makes sonifying practice so problematic. My approach is not perfect, as it is impossible to achieve that, but by limiting my freedom of choice, I tried to get closer to “the real thing”.

What do all the digits of pi, a slice of wood, human DNA and a blueprint of the Eiffel Tower have in common?

That somewhere down the line some different composers made it all sound like C major.

The final score: