Le Mythe de Sisyphe
For this piece, I took Albert Camus' essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) in the original French and isolated all the letters that also represent musical notes (A-G). To make the chord progression that carries throughout the piece, I used only the first paragraph and determined the total number of letters in the words from which these letters came and translated them into musical intervals. For example:
"par" has one musical note, A. It also has three letters in it, so I made a chord with a root A and a third interval.
I did this for all the musical notes in the first paragraph and used whole notes for the chords.
Taking the second paragraph, I again isolated all the musical notes, then used the remaining non-musical letters to determine the rhythm of these notes. I counted the non-musical notes after each musical note and based on the number assigned the preceeding note either a whole(7+ non-musical intervening letters), half (5-6), quarter(3-4), eighth(1-2) or sixteenth(0) note rhythm. Here's an example:
The phrase "ce long" has three musical notes- C, E and G. The C has no non-musical letters between it and the next musical note E, so it gets a 16th note value. The E, on the other hand, has three non-musical letters between it and the G, so it would be given a quarter note vaue.
I repeated this process for the remaining pargraphs in the essay, and assigned intuitively each paragraph an instrument. I then staggered the instruments so they entered and exited in an acceptable fashion.
Finally, I concluded the piece with all instruments playing Albert Camus' signature, a chord composed of two As, a C, a B and an E.
