New Composition: "The River Aire"

Something different in this post, no Gustav Mahler music; instead this time it is my own. I have just uploaded my composition "The River Aire - A Symphonic Poem in 50 Nouns".

The composition was inspired by the poem by David Wilders "The River Aire - From Source to Castleford". This poem basically consists of a series of nouns, each preceded by "the" and grouped into a few segments. I took the "musification" quite literally and attempted to translate each word into a short musical phrase / theme / motif / segment. In October I had musified the first part ("birth of the river Aire"), by December I had added a further segment, and on 5.January 2011 I had come to the end of the poem - by skipping 11 nouns. That version was then played live to an audience on 10.January in India, as part of the Rivers Movement educational program.

A few days ago I sat down in the evenings and completed the missing part, and now the complete poem with all its 50 nouns has been musified. The rendition and the composition are tightly connected, as I was composing it through live improvisation of each instrumental voice on the keyboard while imagining each of the nouns and trying to capture their musical essence. Therefore, I do not yet have a score, because the recording is not available yet in a metric.

The musical language of this composition has been inspired by many composers. Naturally Smetana's "Moldau" ("Vltava") comes to mind, also Debussy's "La Mer". There are a few hints of Ravel and Frederic Delius as well, and Beethoven's "Pastorale" is apparent in the "Fauna" segment. The "Flora" segment appears actually to be inspired by one of Alexander Courage's side themes in some episodes of the StarTrek series - so a whole bunch of musical influences can be detected. All this is not deliberate, it just turns out that the music that came to my mind while I was trying to find associating themes for each word, originated from my sub-conscience, in which all these influences seem to have been stored. Overall there is of course again our friend Gustav Mahler apparent - I was not able to shake off the occupation with his music in the past months.

Hope that this music still can be classified as original and not as pastiche!

The MP3 and WMA files of this recording are available on the VPO website. I plan to release shortly a video with the music and the nouns of the poem in its current version. In the meantime, you can try to envision the words without aid while listening, or get the list of words directly from the poem by David Wilders.