You Are Loved - Benjamin Slattery 2019
You Are Loved
Benjamin Slattery (2019)
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Description:
A short narrative (a paragraph or so) about your composition; how it was made; how it was inspired. Add any additional links you'd like to your own website/Soundcloud, etc. My composition is based off of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. I wanted to convey the message that no matter what, you can always come home and you'll be accepted with love, and so much joy that it will be a feast. I tried to match up the sections of the song with the main beats of the story (losing everything, deciding to come home, celebrating the return). I included the following text from the Gospel of St. John:
For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting.
Sic enim Deus dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret: ut omnis qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam.
I chose to include this text because I feel like it best describes how incredibly strong God's love is. I used the Latin Vulgate translation to go back to the roots of Western music, Gregorian Chant, as well as to not exclude people from the message of the song who do not know the Catholic faith (I know Latin might exclude some people, but most likely fewer than mentioning God because Latin is like a cool secret message, like the backwards messages in those metal and rock songs). One of the key elements of Gregorian Chant is not being in a meter, so to keep that element of the style I fit the text into the meter using tuplets. I did this by splitting the text into subgroups so that each subgroup starts with the accented syllables. Then I turned each subgroup into a tuplet based on the number of syllables in it. Dubstep is known for sounding very random with unexpected noises and rhythms, so I realized that my tuplets were the perfect script for an interesting dubstep part. I developed a Max patch that allows you play in rhythms from notes. I mapped them such that each note was as follows (the beats per measure listed are concerning the lowest octave in which the number of beats is a whole number):
- C - 2 beats per measure - 1 * 2octave
- C# - 17 beats per measure - 1.0625 * 2octave
- D - 9 beats per measure - 1.125 * 2octave
- D# - 19 beats per measure - 1.1875 * 2octave
- E - 5 beats per measure - 1.25 * 2octave
- F - 11 beats per measure - 1.375 * 2octave
- F# - 23 beats per measure - 1.4375 * 2octave
- G - 3 beats per measure - 1.5 * 2octave
- G# - 25 beats per measure - 1.5625 * 2octave
- A - 13 beats per measure - 1.625 * 2octave
- Bb - 7 beats per measure - 1.75 * 2octave
- B - 15 beats per measure - 1.875 * 2octave
In order to get each rhythm to be twice as many beats per measure as the octave below and for the rhythms to be in strictly ascending order, I had to organize the rhythms such that all the whole number rhythms form the harmonic series (1-C1, 2-C2, 3-G2, 4-C3, 5-E3, 6-G3, 7-Bb3, 8-C4, 9-D4, etc.) Theoretically the mapping should include all prime numbers less than 32, but it turns out there are more than 12 prime numbers so some of them would be quarter tones, so I had to exclude those rhythms. I used this to map Gregorian Chant to Dubstep by playing G for triplets, E for quintuplets, Bb for septuplets, etc. I interacted with the system by playing this live.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGgxBytFlLqmfaGYuyN7GGw
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/surreal/id1170673831
https://twitter.com/StarstormForest