Twelve Scientists is the name of a series of compositions that I wrote for my Senior Project for my B.A. in Music. They are all twelve-tone, or serial compositions except for one, Heisenberg, which is simply atonal, not serial. The tone rows used in the various pieces are based on important numbers from the work of each scientist. I chose twelve because of the obvious connection with the compositional technique. The movements are titled:
Heisenberg
Euclid
Pythagorus
Einstein
Darwin
Doppler
Keppler
Mendel
Cuvier
Newton
Galileo
Von Braun
To listen to Doppler, click on the title of the song.
You must have the RealPlayer G2 program installed in order to listen to the piece. If you don't already have it, you can download it from RealPlayer. You can get a copy for free, or get the deluxe version for $29.95.
Total time is approximately 33 minutes. The music is kind of like
Schoenberg
crossed with Yes, with a little bit of Emerson, Lake and Palmer
thrown in. It's not commercially available, because it doesn't have
a million-seller in it (see Mt. Everest),
but I'd love to sell you a CD, cheap! ($15.00 plus shipping) You
might like it! Please e-mail me at reuben@arkrat.net
for details and I'll mail it out to you. The CD will also have
Antipodes,
my Master's thesis on it.
For a bit more, I'll throw in the rather extensive
papers that were written to accompany both works. They explain the
compositional procedure used and other interesting background information
about the scientists themselves. For considerably more, I'll send
you the complete musical scores that were also prepared as part of the
projects.
This HTML version of the text for Twelve Scientists is lacking several elements that appear in the paper version, and in transfering it to HTML, a lot of the formating was trashed, making some of the paper rather difficult to follow. I'll try to continue editing the pages to make it right, but it's going to be a lot of work. However, one should be able to understand the bulk of the paper, so give it a try.