As I've yet to find too many horror-appropriate classical pieces it should come at no surprise that there are exceedingly few leaves that qualify (and most of those I'm keeping for my article on Kubiniana). After much head scratching I remembered that I had a ghostly tune hidden, or rather written, right under my nose. Back when I was taking composition lessons I finished three movements of a set of five "woodcuts" for piccolo and two violins at the beginning of my fascination with one-pagers; you can view the score, as well as the rest of my uploaded music, at my IMSLP page. I challenged myself to confine each piece to one page, and the one that ended up with the most variety per second was "A Spectre".
Written without meter (as I do), "A Spectre" was written at a time when I was bizarrely writing eighth rests backwards, so I'm sorry if that's confusing. The opening statement is a knock on a violin body with the other icily running as close to the overtone series as I could get with the artificial scale I wrote the piece in. The joke was a play on the spectralist school of composition, a gang of French composers who drew their compositional water from the harmonic spectrum blown into thousands of pieces and analyzed by computers. After that the nerd stuff gets booted out and I tried to make my ghost as wacky as possible. At the time I was deeply invested in Stravinsky's "primitivist" music, or rather the music he wrote in between Petrushka and Pulcinella, which included a lot of concise, hyper-dramatic chamber music like the Three Pieces for String Quartet, Renard, Berceuses du chat and the Three Japanese Lyrics. This love affair with terse exoticism is present in every second of the piece, though I'll eat my own legs before even daring to compare myself with the great Igor. The notes with slashes through them in line three refer to two different extended techniques - one violin plays the notes behind the bridge and the other presses the bow down too hard in order to create a scratch tone. These sounds make a demented march which leads into a reprise of the "spectre" motive. I apologize for rambling on about my own work, but since there's no recording I have to use my imagination. The good news is that you'll only have to use your imagination if you feel like it, as per that lack of recorded evidence I mentioned earlier, so if you're not in the mood to indulge my own work you can look forward to regularly scheduled programming next time. Or can you?
~PNK
~PNK
