New Music: GALAXY Piece I

I know, it looks like I’m just gushing music forth from my Mozartean brain, doesn’t it?

Trust me, I am doing no such thing. Remember that Alleluia was a 30-year-old piece that I just now put into Finale, and this piece GALAXY Piece I, well…

First, some background for those just joining us:

GALAXY is a light art installation that I designed and fellow Lichtenbergian Turff engineered for Alchemy, the Burning-Man-style burn in Georgia. It got sidetracked during the pandemic, but finally made its debut last fall. You can read about it here.

This fall it will return to Alchemy with the addition of a silent disco: ten headsets being broadcast to by a little transmitter. I have a playlist ready to go, all new age ambient space music, but last month one of my camp mates posted a lovely video of him playing a flute on his back porch during a storm, and I asked him to send the mp3 file to me so I could add it to the playlist.

Then it dawned on me: At least half the hippies at Alchemy are musicians, many of them composers. Why not call for original new age ambient space music works and feature our own people?

Here is my submission. It is the biggest cheat I’ve ever done: Using GarageBand’s built-in synth sounds do the actual “performance” is lazy, and… well, listen to it, and then I’ll confess the worst of it afterwards.

See? Perfectly cromulent. Believe it or not, it has design, even pacing, that I actually had to craft as we went along. I'm not that lazy.

But remember that one of the Precepts of Lichtenbergianism is STEAL FROM THE BEST. It occurred to me that it would be a whole lot easier to create what is essentially a throwaway piece if I didn’t have to, you know, actually compose the thing, so I stole the entire harmonic structure of this piece — and some melodic hints — from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1: Preludium. Yes, you know it. It’s that “cello piece.”

So if you were thinking, as you let the music wash over you, that the harmonies of the piece seemed to be a bit unusual for a piece of new age ambient space music, good for you.

And if you were thinking, “Shoot, I should compose a perfectly cromulent piece of new age ambient space music for the GALAXY Soundtrack Project…,” good for you. Go do that. STEAL FROM THE BEST. Cheat. Deconstruct Wagner’s Liebestod or Copland’s Rodeo or even actually compose something: Become the next Steve Roach or Brian Eno. I look forward to your music as much as your confessions!