Deniz Çağlarcan · for string trio

Cthulhu

VIOLIN · VIOLA · CELLO

A mysterious, silent waiting of the unknown future. The tension never releases.

Full Score Compositional Process
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Program Note

The title comes from H.P. Lovecraft and his story The Call of Cthulhu. An old and gigantic entity, worshipped by cultists, living under the water, waiting for the right time to reveal itself.

The sonic world of the music is related to this mysterious and silent waiting of the unknown future. Furthermore, the tension of the waiting never releases. The soundworld is representative of the traditional electro-acoustic music world.

The main theme at the beginning is built by considering the ADSR envelope of the sound, and its components of morphological structure find places to develop through the music. Three instruments create one meta-instrument, with an unnatural, tape-music kind of envelope.

Chords in the music come from FM synthesis. The string trio sounds as a whole, and these chords are non-existent in the natural world, like the world Cthulhu lives in. The mystery under the water is complementary to this world.

Listening eyes closed is highly suggested, to enhance the experience of this artificial sonic world.

One Meta-Instrument

Three players, fused into a single voice with a tape-music envelope, the kind that does not exist in the natural world.

I
Violin
II
Viola
III
Cello

three instruments · one envelope · one entity

Compositional Process

The first three bars are the main theme. Everything that follows is a development of the ADSR shape held inside that first motive. The attack is bar one, the decay is bar two, the release is bar three. Each is given its own space across the whole piece.

Bar 1 Bar 2 Bar 3 Attack Decay Sustain Release
Bar 1

Attack

The onset of the meta-instrument. The waiting begins.

Bar 2

Decay

The shape settles into its sustained, held tension.

Bar 3

Release

A fall that never fully resolves. The tension stays.

There are also chords in the music which are, in fact, FM chords. I used OpenMusic and Max to generate frequency-modulator chords, seen below. This produces an electronic-music sound world out of a string trio.

OpenMusic patch generating the FM frequency-modulator chords for Cthulhu
OpenMusic · FM frequency-modulator chord generation Max · electronic sound world for acoustic strings

Full Score

Cthulhu for string trio · 9 pages, portrait · violin, viola, cello

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