Music,  Solo

Patchwork Scriabin

The wonderful Composer Quest podcast is celebrating the life of composer Alexander Scriabin (who died 100 years ago this week) by producing a version of his Prelude in A minor, Op. 11 No. 2 that features 68 different forms of instrumentation, one for each bar of music.

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I am happy to have provided two of those bars, which can be found, nested in this musical patchwork of strings, brass, chiptunes, vocals, drums, samples and just about anything else that can be used to make music. That’s quite a mixture, which has been very smoothly sewn together by Charlie so that the whole thing flows surprisingly well.

My two bars made use of the bouzouki, acoustic guitar, bass, organ and a couple of synth parts, with each of the two bars containing a different combination of instruments. At a tempo of 138 beats per minute, they are a bit “blink-and-you’ll-miss-them”, but they’re at bars 59 and 60. This isn’t the first time I’ve dabbled with Scriabin; back on the first Lunacy Board album I wrote a short piece called “The Promethean Chord” that was based on Scriabin’s ‘chord of Prometheus’ or ‘Mystic chord‘.

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There will be a Composer Quest episode dedicated to the project coming out soon, so look out for that, too.