Still can't make up my mind as to whether I prefer the French or Romanian spectral schools, but either way, I simply love the beautifully ethereal mysticism of Radulescu's work!!
+Kris Mariasy I think that just enjoying the melodic lines and rhythms of the individual instruments, and how they combine to form a total texture with its own personality, is all that is needed. For contemporary era string quartets or other small chamber ensembles, there's a greater emphasis on the totality of the sound, the totality of the texture, and differences in that texture, although in the most successful music (like Radulescu's here) each individual component still has an identity too.
It's tablature, like guitar tab but for violins, viola and cellos. For strings each, highest is 1st string, lowest is 4th or IVth. The numbers on top of each stave (15, 30. 45 etc) are seconds. The symbols explained in the beginning indicate certain very specific playing techniques.
Huge can of worms, and Radulescu is intentionally vague and leaves some things out of the performance notes. If you're still interested, William Dougherty had an paper published in Tempo called "On Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet ('Before the Universe Was Born') Op. 89" where he briefly goes into the notation as well as the compositional theory.
so basically the harmonic series is the way of multiplying the frequency of note to create more notes that are increasingly higher and closer in pitch, and all the instruments are tuned down basically to different "ground" notes or fundamentals as they are called.
The Lao tzu quoations are used as rhythmic material, there's something on it in the beginning text. However the music quite deliberately abandons traditional notions of rhythm but not of a moving state in general. Radulescu used the analogy Sound Plasma, something that is constantly moving at seemingly random pace in a harmonically rich soundworld, where it has not become noise but hasn't become rhythm+melody or even pointillistic serialism either. The structure uses a lot of fibonacci/golden ratio ideas, there maybe a relation between these numbers and the pitch materials but I'm not sure. If you haven't listened to any of this before, it's not necessary to understand anything about how it is made. Just sit down relax, have some tea, turn it up notch and fall into it, allow your self to be immersed in the sound plasma. Without expecting tension or drama as in conventional musical structures it is nevertheless a very rewarding drama in this music, even though the listening is more open, distant, actually not over-analyzing. And if that doesn't tell you anything, see if you can find outdoor field recordings from Romania and it might give you some hint.
Thank you for your perspective. Can you point out to me specific instances where either Fibonacci numbers or Golden Ratio relationships are employed? I can't seem to find any myself.
well for instance page 13 starts with synchronicity, each page is like an icon, it's own one minute picture, although there is continuity there is also individuality of each page which is very much part of the musical structure. I think it has mostly to do with the overall time structure. Perhaps if you count the whole piece in minutes (29*60=1740) and divide that according to golden ratio or nested fibonacci numbers one might find something. For instance that seems to be a turnover between going from page 17 to 18 which is approximately where a calculate the golden mean. However, there are often great changes at the page turns so this might not say much but I would believe that there is something along those lines in there, I don't know exactly how or what and maybe not a lot of people do. He passed away before he could explain all of this, his language was very poetic and hard to penetrate the poetic nature of his speech. But we know for sure that both in terms of form and pitch material he was obsessed with numbers and their relationships.
Still can't make up my mind as to whether I prefer the French or Romanian spectral schools, but either way, I simply love the beautifully ethereal mysticism of Radulescu's work!!
Proud to be romanian
I can see Joker dancing to this music. Hildur Gudnadottir and Jonny Greenwood are great, but this is the real thing.
This is so magical. Thank you for sharing. I love it.
Thanks for uploading great music (with scores)!
+Emre Sihan Kaleli thank you for composing music!
These were the fastest 30 minutes in my life, and that's meant in a good way!! Awesome stuff.
great sound. i just canot believe that before the universe was born there happened so many things
Maybe it was never born: maybe it always existed. Maybe the composer is expressing his difficulty in grasping this concept.
such a great piece...
very beautiful and a great and inspiring notation as well.
This like very creepy. I could just imagine the sound visually.
can anybody explain what the captions at the top are trying to say?
hello, you have the score in pdf?
I wish I knew what was going on in this
+Kris Mariasy I think that just enjoying the melodic lines and rhythms of the individual instruments, and how they combine to form a total texture with its own personality, is all that is needed. For contemporary era string quartets or other small chamber ensembles, there's a greater emphasis on the totality of the sound, the totality of the texture, and differences in that texture, although in the most successful music (like Radulescu's here) each individual component still has an identity too.
Is this from a release? If so, please tell me the title and release information, if you don't mind. I'm looking for it and can't find it.
bill wurtz but he's gone insane, i guess
will you be doing more by Radulescu?
i don't have more scores unfortunately :/
If you wanted to do more, I have some PDFs.
+Ian Mikyska oh that would be fantastic! i just have some text scores of his that look a bit like fluxus art ^^
Haha, send me your email in a message and I will send them your way :)
+Ian Mikyska christian@spielvogel.de
?
How do you read the notation? It does not sound like the common 5-line staves.
It's tablature, like guitar tab but for violins, viola and cellos. For strings each, highest is 1st string, lowest is 4th or IVth. The numbers on top of each stave (15, 30. 45 etc) are seconds. The symbols explained in the beginning indicate certain very specific playing techniques.
Huge can of worms, and Radulescu is intentionally vague and leaves some things out of the performance notes. If you're still interested, William Dougherty had an paper published in Tempo called "On Horatiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet ('Before the Universe Was Born') Op. 89" where he briefly goes into the notation as well as the compositional theory.
Damn elitism n shit. This sounds like the demons under my bed at midnight taking a crap.
record them and upload the recording pls
i don't understand the sense of this "song" or however you want to call it, explain please
so basically the harmonic series is the way of multiplying the frequency of note to create more notes that are increasingly higher and closer in pitch, and all the instruments are tuned down basically to different "ground" notes or fundamentals as they are called.
i understand the concept of the harmonic series, but how does that relate to the compositional technique, outside of the use of scordatura?
The Lao tzu quoations are used as rhythmic material, there's something on it in the beginning text. However the music quite deliberately abandons traditional notions of rhythm but not of a moving state in general. Radulescu used the analogy Sound Plasma, something that is constantly moving at seemingly random pace in a harmonically rich soundworld, where it has not become noise but hasn't become rhythm+melody or even pointillistic serialism either. The structure uses a lot of fibonacci/golden ratio ideas, there maybe a relation between these numbers and the pitch materials but I'm not sure. If you haven't listened to any of this before, it's not necessary to understand anything about how it is made. Just sit down relax, have some tea, turn it up notch and fall into it, allow your self to be immersed in the sound plasma. Without expecting tension or drama as in conventional musical structures it is nevertheless a very rewarding drama in this music, even though the listening is more open, distant, actually not over-analyzing. And if that doesn't tell you anything, see if you can find outdoor field recordings from Romania and it might give you some hint.
Thank you for your perspective. Can you point out to me specific instances where either Fibonacci numbers or Golden Ratio relationships are employed? I can't seem to find any myself.
well for instance page 13 starts with synchronicity, each page is like an icon, it's own one minute picture, although there is continuity there is also individuality of each page which is very much part of the musical structure. I think it has mostly to do with the overall time structure. Perhaps if you count the whole piece in minutes (29*60=1740) and divide that according to golden ratio or nested fibonacci numbers one might find something. For instance that seems to be a turnover between going from page 17 to 18 which is approximately where a calculate the golden mean. However, there are often great changes at the page turns so this might not say much but I would believe that there is something along those lines in there, I don't know exactly how or what and maybe not a lot of people do. He passed away before he could explain all of this, his language was very poetic and hard to penetrate the poetic nature of his speech. But we know for sure that both in terms of form and pitch material he was obsessed with numbers and their relationships.