The GPL

july 2005, Leuven (Belgium)

A composition for mixed choir with 8 voices. I made this piece for the composition contest 'Vlaams-Brabant' in 2005. Actually I sent two pieces to the contest. I was testing a bit, writing one rather modern composition (which i thought was the better of the two), and one a bit more traditional but less good in my opinion. This is the latter...

I was curious which one would win, if any. Luckily, the jury choose the modern composition '4', so i can still keep faith in contests a bit.

I often find it difficult to choose texts that go well with my musical ideas. It did not went different in this case. In the end i came up with the General Public License, used by the open source (linux) community to protect their software. Open source has always been very important to me. It is because of open software that i learned to program. Therefore i thought a 'hommage' to the GPL would be a nice thing. But how to set a very long, boring lawyer text to music? I went back to programming and made a small program that generated a much shorter non-sense text out of the GPL.

The music itself was very simple. I tried to have a constant quarternote pulse on A throughout the piece and keep it interesting as long as i could. Since the text has no meaning at all i could do about anything: changing dynamics, adding colour, making rhythmic variations... So that's basicaly what i did.

The score can of course be downloaded as pdf or sibelius file.

The program i wrote to generate the text can also be downloaded. However, at that time i still used variable names in Dutch mostly. Sorry about that.