This is interesting in a problematic kind of way:

Craig, in his never-ending search to crank it all the way up, sent 11-11-11. Since the first range of the first number is 1-5, it cycles back to 1.

So then right on his heels, Jobie sent me 1-11-18. See what they did there? They’ve put me within 10 lines of each other in the same poem.

Even more interestingly, that poem is Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion.”

It’s all about choices, innit? Do I treat them both as being from the same piece? Do I set them separately? Do I further explore the wedding song idea, and do I rip off the Renaissance again? It’s a puzzle.

On top of that, my time is actually booked tonight and tomorrow night, although I should have enough to squeeze out something. We’ll see. Midnight tomorrow is a long time away.

One thing at a time:

And teach the woods and waters to lament
Your dolefull dreriment

…which is lines 10-11 of the poem. We’ll think about line 18 another day.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/27/09, 7:36 am

Another early morning post, so no vocal rendition yet. I’ll get this one and #6 this afternoon.

24 hour challenge #7, “Your Dolefull Dreriment,” for Craig: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

This is a prime example of what I like to call “cheating through orchestration.” The accompaniment is so far from interesting that I’m willing to bet my lottery earnings that we can find its exact chord progression in half a dozen Baroque pieces. (Certainly the passacaglia-like structure is Baroque.) But hand it over to a plucked bass and vibraphone, and suddenly it’s self-aware and all cool and stuff. I’m OK with that. One thing I’m learning from this experiment is that it’s perfectly fine to take the easy way out. If these were real pieces, I would go back and tinker with them to make them interesting, but as it is, I’m learning to just spit it out without regard to quality.