![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Saturday Afternoon Blues
Friday, February 7th, 2020 10:30 amWhen I was a teenager, way back in the middle of the last century, I used to dabble in musical composition, as well as writing fiction, despite the fact I didn't study music at school beyond the age of fourteen, and my lack of qualifications in composition beyond Grade 5 Theory of Music.
This, dating from about 1990, is the best of what I turned out. It's pretty derivative, but then all my creative endeavours were then. (My writing would eventually evolve past that; my composition petered out before it got to that point.)
It's also badly named; the "blues" in the title refers to the mood, but in the title of a piece of music one would expect it to indicate the genre, which it doesn't.
It is programmed and played on the Hybrid Music System for the BBC Microcomputer, which I think I might have got as a barmitzvah present from my parents. It sounds pretty crude and electronic today, but back in the eighties, you couldn't get a more powerful system for programming and playing music for anything near like the price.
The language the Hybrid Music System used, AMPLE, was, so my more musical brother told me, the best one around for encapsulating musical notation in a text-based form, to the extent that to this day, if I have to jot down music, I'm more likely to do it in AMPLE than go to the bother of scrawling down a stave. In AMPLE one extends a note, or a rest, by whatever the current unit of time is set to with a slash, a.k.a. solidus ("/"); this actually works by moving the current pointer in time forward by this much. One can also move the pointer back by that much with a backslash (a.k.a. reverse solidus), so take that, Omar Khayyam! *ahem* I mean, hence the subtitle of the piece. This functionality is useful when a phrase or longer section is repeated except for the last few notes.
Don't ask me why I am posting this here now; a critique from my musical friends would probably be humiliating. But OTOH they're my friends so I'm hopeful they're not going to humiliate me.
And if you're not one of my friends, then all I can say is well done for reading this far. ;^)
This, dating from about 1990, is the best of what I turned out. It's pretty derivative, but then all my creative endeavours were then. (My writing would eventually evolve past that; my composition petered out before it got to that point.)
It's also badly named; the "blues" in the title refers to the mood, but in the title of a piece of music one would expect it to indicate the genre, which it doesn't.
It is programmed and played on the Hybrid Music System for the BBC Microcomputer, which I think I might have got as a barmitzvah present from my parents. It sounds pretty crude and electronic today, but back in the eighties, you couldn't get a more powerful system for programming and playing music for anything near like the price.
The language the Hybrid Music System used, AMPLE, was, so my more musical brother told me, the best one around for encapsulating musical notation in a text-based form, to the extent that to this day, if I have to jot down music, I'm more likely to do it in AMPLE than go to the bother of scrawling down a stave. In AMPLE one extends a note, or a rest, by whatever the current unit of time is set to with a slash, a.k.a. solidus ("/"); this actually works by moving the current pointer in time forward by this much. One can also move the pointer back by that much with a backslash (a.k.a. reverse solidus), so take that, Omar Khayyam! *ahem* I mean, hence the subtitle of the piece. This functionality is useful when a phrase or longer section is repeated except for the last few notes.
Don't ask me why I am posting this here now; a critique from my musical friends would probably be humiliating. But OTOH they're my friends so I'm hopeful they're not going to humiliate me.
And if you're not one of my friends, then all I can say is well done for reading this far. ;^)
