Spring 2012 from The Seasons

(Here's a thought: listen to Spring 2012 right now and read the following folderol later.)

I've just posted the second piece in my sequence of mostly silent works.  The sequence is entitled The Seasons.  The new piece is called Spring 2012.  It includes one short musical event for each day between the last Spring Equinox and the current Summer Solstice.  These musical events are separated by quite a lot of silence.  Overall Spring 2012 is about 75% silence.

For the most part I wrote one event per day as the days flew by.  Sometimes, unavoidably, I fell behind.  When that happened I was always able to bring my composing up to date with the fleeting calendar by writing two or three events in a single day.

Also for the most part, the musical events in Spring 2012 are longer than those in the first piece in the series, Winter 2011.  This increased the overall length by more than a third.  Spring 2012 is just over 79 minutes long - another minute and it would not have fit on a compact disc.  For archival purposes only, of course.

Thirdly, for the most part, the musical events of Spring 2012 have more musical unity than those of Winter 2011.  There is a common, often obvious, musical motive which reappears.  The motive originated in Winter 2011 - a silly bit of conceptual continuity.

I restricted the types of sounds as well - using mostly string sounds leavened with occasional pitched percussion (piano, gongs and drums).  On Mondays, which in these parts is garbage day (a minor repetitive non-religious weekly community celebration), I often used only percussion.  I must have had a good reason for that.

I encourage you to listen to this piece while you listen to other music.  Any other music.  I've provided a link on the playback page to make it easy to play Winter 2011 and Spring 2012 simultaneously.

Click here to hear Spring 2012 by David Ocker - © 2012 David Ocker 4746 seconds

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Need some background info on this series?  You might want to read the folderol I wrote about the previous piece, Winter 2011.

While you're listening you might want to read about the notion that solstices and equinoxes do not really mark the beginnings of actual seasons.  Go to Bad Astronomy or The Straight Dope.

Seasonal Tags: Spring 2012. . . David Ocker. . . The Seasons