Stealing from the best, and I do mean the BEST...

First, some context. A few years ago I was struck with an inspiration for an art project for Alchemy, Georgia’s regional version of Burning Man. It was such a simple concept: rings of electroluminescent wire arranged in a giant spiral — the GALAXY project.

Simple concept, not-so-simple execution. We (and by “we” I mean chief engineer Turff) had to figure out how to power 196 rings in the middle of a field. It’s been a journey, but Turff pulled it off, debuting our masterpiece at Alchemy 2022. There were some technical issues, like hippies tripping over the wires and short-circuiting whole sections, but Turff thinks he has those resolved and GALAXY will return to the burn this fall.

(You might think that a simple spiral labyrinth would be easy to walk, especially one with only three turns, but it is amazingly disorienting even sober, and let’s just say that most of the participants were not that. Also, as I discovered in Santa Fe’s Temples of the Cosmos, a spiral labyrinth — with its endless turning in one direction — is a very different meditative space than the other patterns.)

At Alchemy this fall, along with GALAXY itself, we will include a silent disco with various ambient/space music tracks on loop. We’ll see if the floaty music makes it easier or harder to negotiate the space.

Last year I invited other burners to compose pieces for this soundtrack, but no one took me up on it. I, however, hammered out a piece, and today I am giving my full confession about how I made it.

First, here’s the piece:

Not your usual suspended-in-space ambient stuff, and here’s why: I used a harmonic analysis of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite #1, the Prelude, as the structure for the whole piece. I got it from here. I stole Bach’s brain.

First I mapped out the whole piece:

Then I opened up Apple’s GarageBand, explored the sounds, and picked three. Majestic Sweep is the bass note with the whistling downsweep; it leads us through the path Bach has provided and cues the start of the next section. Next, Zen Garden with its built-in tinkly, random arpeggiations gives us the feeling of space, stars. Finally, in the sixth “measure,” Blue Carpet’s high strings gives us a little contrast as well as a melodic lead-in to the next chord.

It was both fun and a challenge to put together. I usually work in Finale, either piano or orchestra, and exploring the electronic sounds in GarageBand was a large part of the process, plus the piece is not metrical in any way. As I created each “measure,” I listened and made decisions about the length of the sound and how much gap there should be between it and the next measure. I could literally draw the length of the sounds, extending the measure, both raising the listener’s expectations and sometimes subverting it.

It was more like sculpting than composing — I was manipulating the physical representation of sound until it felt right, a completely different mode than creating melodies and variations for flutes and cellos.

Because I STOLE FROM THE BEST — literally THE BEST — the piece actually feels like a journey through some kind of space: the chordal progression makes sense to our ears, and the shift from one tonality to the next, especially as Bach begins to stray wildly from the key of G major, is just as astonishing as the original.

And because I paid attention to the way that the tinkly bits and high strings created patterns, I was able to use those patterns keep the listener on track — until I inverted the Blue Carpet pattern and led the listener into a very classical resolution.

Here’s your reminder that I would love to have your submission to the GALAXY Soundtrack. You have 110 days until I have to pack for Alchemy.

With that, I am off to To The Moon, Tennessee’s burn, and I will see you all next week.