Several years ago, when I was deep into composing contemporary classical music, I belonged to a music forum.  One of the things we used to do on the forum is have challenges.  You can see this post for more detail, but basically the winner of the last challenge would come up with a motif and everyone else had to write a piece of music based on the theme.  I thought I had a real chance to win Challenge 12 (I might have if I would have only put in one entry) so I decided to create a theme for Challenge 13, just in case.  I wrote a short sample piece to go along with this little motif, not to play as I posted it (no influence to the competitors) but just to show that the abstract motif wasn’t that far out.  I didn’t win Challenge 12, so I never used that theme except for this short work.  I posted it and everyone loved it, but that was the end.  I had always meant to expand it, and the people on the forum expected me to, but I never got around to it and eventually stopped writing classical music.

I really liked the music, Thirteen!, and so I decided to make a little video of that snippet I created as an example.  It’s a little dark at the end, so I thought “Halloween”, but I didn’t have time to make Halloween graphics.  I used fall foliage scenery, including short videos of me running around in the woods behind my house and call it “autumn inspired” instead of “Halloween”  Enjoy!

(If you don’t see the video below, click here)

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A Quick note.  The theme/motif I wrote as a challenge, which is heard towards the end, is 13 beats long and has 13 different notes (it’s a 12-tone row, but I had one of the notes skip an octave).  So 13 notes, all different, played in 13 beats.  Besides being an alternative for Challenge 13, it had 13 built into it, thus the name, Thirteen!

Another note.  I’m thinking seriously of expanding this and doing an electronic version.  You know, like the all old-school synth music I’ve recently posted (see Lost Star).  Let me know what you think of the idea!