David's Divot is a chunk of motivic dirt and grass, two short fragments of melody played somewhat contrapuntally with artificial saxophone sounds. It just refused to fit into the longer piece on which I'm working. It called too much attention to itself. So I resolved to excise it. I would perform a motifectomy.
Feeling guilty, lest I be accused of motificide, I decided to use the divot as the beginning of a separate thirty-second spot. In the final version the divot got bumped to the second phrase. The spot lasts 51 seconds.
Click here to hear David's Divot (short version) © 2012 David Ocker, 51 seconds
But I wasn't satisfied. I decided to expand this disjointed music into a longer piece. The expansion method was simple - I added a bunch of silence. I did change some small details and separated some overlapping ideas. Even so, the music of the two versions is essentially the same. The short piece became nearly 8 times longer.
Click here to hear David's Divot (long version) © 2012 David Ocker, 398 seconds
This process is similar to what I did to Jingle Bells last December. Actually it's backward because that time I made the long version first and distilled it into a shorter one.
I've been interested in pieces which are mostly silence with occasional musical eructations. I enjoy listening to them simultaneously with more conventional music - like from a radio station - and listening for unpredictable combinations of sound.
Divot Tags: divot. . . motifectomy. . . motificide
2 comments :
I enjoyed the piece very much. You have found a unique style.
One day whilst on a walk I noticed something in the street I thought was odd. Did you know that most of our manhole covers are made in India? Apparently forged by skinny barefooted men who are seemingly impervious to the heat. True story: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/nyregion/26manhole.html
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