Evening

Just last week someone asked me how I write music. I told that person: usually I find a text that inspires me and then I just write down the music that comes to me naturally.

The music in this video was written in exactly this way. You can find the poem (and other poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Jessie Lemont) here: http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026255822
The music may sound a bit weird at first, but the more you listen to it, the more accessible it becomes.

I'm rather glad with the harmonic colours I've managed to produce here (I believe you can hear harmonic influences of the late russian romantic era (e.g. Scriabin), from the impressionist era (Debussy) as well as contemporary jazz harmonies).

Some technical data:

The piano is a yamaha gt2 digital grand piano. The sound is recorded on a boss br600 multi-track recorder in dry recording mode using two different tracks (you will hear the synchronization problems - it's hard to record a second track if you play rubato :) ).The texts are generated using a python script that drives the incredible imagemagick program (the same script I used to generate the subtitles in the requiem; this time I found out why those were looking rather awful in the end result and I fixed that problem[1]). The sound and the texts were mixed in a recent svn version of kdenlive on linux debian unstable.

[1] the problem was that kdenlive (or one of its helper libraries) doesn't seem to like .png files with partially transparent pixels (unless you composite them with another video track). Those come out fully opaque.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• evening
• avond
• poem
• poezie
• song
• lied
• rainer
• maria
• rilke
• stefaan
• himpe
• jessie
• lemont
• digital
• piano
• jazz
• scriabin
• debussy
• python
• imagemagick
• yamaha
• gt2
• boss
• br
• 600
• kdenlive
• linux
• debian
• unstable
• poetry
• classical

[StefaanHimpe]

@gonrolgonrol Thanks for stopping by and for listening to some of my compositions :)

[gonrolgonrol]

Wonderful, truly wonderful!

[StefaanHimpe]

Thanks a lot! Glad you liked it.

[suzettegm]

Nice harmonies, congrats!