North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

Carmilla

Neo-Baroque suite for piano four hands, inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella Carmilla. This is a vampire story predating Dracula, and it introduced many ideas that later became standard parts of vampire lore. To use an anime analogy, if Dracula is the Neon Genesis Evangelion of vampire books, then Carmilla is the Revolutionary Girl Utena of vampire books.

There's a notation video for this piece on the video server.

The music is written for two pianists sharing a keyboard, and I imagine Laura and Carmilla, the two main characters in the book, playing it together. From the descriptions in the book, Carmilla would've been a young noblewoman, and would have been expected to learn music, in the middle of the Baroque period just before her death. Assuming she remained interested in music during her undeath (possibly using it to seduce her victims, like the Seventeenth Angel), then it's reasonable she would have ended up with a musical style combining Baroque features with more modern innovations. So that's what this is intended to be: the music of the vampire.

Downloadable sheet music for the suite is available in the form of parts (in "piano four hands" format with synchronized page turns and each pianist's music separately on the appropriate side) and score (both parts formatted together, for analysis or to follow while listening).

The book is available for free download from Project Gutenberg.

Tracks are rendered with the City Piano SFZ sample library and sfizz.

This file contains the entire suite (prelude and four movements) concatenated together, so you can listen to it all without separately pressing "play" on each movement.

At one time it was common for performers, especially on harpsichord, to play a little bit of improvised music to check the tuning, warm up their fingers, and set the mood for the more seriously planned performance to follow. Originally, these "preludes" would be entirely made up on the spot; but there eventually developed a tradition of practicing them in advance and writing them down. Nowadays the "prelude" is a specific genre of short written keyboard (usually piano) music. But there was an intermediate stage, especially during the 17th Century, when some composers wrote unmeasured preludes, where the written music showed which pitches to play but not their durations. Louis Couperin is one of the today best-known 17th Century composers of unmeasured preludes, and I have followed his notation (an interesting challenge for computer notation software) in writing mine.

I wanted to put an unmeasured prelude into the Carmilla suite both because I thought the concept was fun, and as a sort of clue to anyone who might try to play the music from the written form that this entire suite is intended to be played under something like Baroque performance practice, in other words, with improvisation allowed. In the Baroque period, written music was seen as more a guideline or suggestion than as detailed and precise instructions. It is not meant for players to reproduce the timing and exact notes played by my MIDI sequencer; and writing the prelude unmeasured forces them to realize that right from the start.

Baroque suites are collections of dances - or at least, musical movements written in forms traditionally associated with specific dances, whether people are meant to actually dance to them or not - in a traditional sequence. After the prelude if there is one, the first dance is usually an Allemande, which is the French word meaning "German," because it was traditonally thought to be a dance from Germany.

Just slightly later in history, when people were composing symphonies instead of dance suites, the tradition arose for the first movement to be in a specific structural form called "sonata form" or even, sometimes, "first movement form." Here, I tried to write something that would sit on the fence as both an Allemande and a sonata movement.

The book is set in Styria, which is now part of Austria, but given that "Germany" is to some extent a more recent invention, I think it's reasonably within the geographic area associated with the Allemande dance form.

In accordance with the sonata form, this movement starts by introducing two themes or short melodies, in the closely related keys of C and G. Then it "explores" those themes in other keys, bringing out different feelings and aspects of them with different kinds of accompaniments, before finally bringing them both back into C (and thereby reconciling them with each other). I used the keys of G, Eb, and B as the "foreign" keys in between. Those are exactly the notes of the Eb augmented chord that I use to symbolize Carmilla herself thoughout the suite.

The Eb augmented chord is harmonically ambiguous: it consists of three notes equally spaced, four semitones apart, so that none of them can be exactly called the root, or contrariwise all of them can be called the root. Eb augmented, on an equally-tempered instrument like the modern piano, is really the same chord as G augmented, B augmented, and D# augmented, just "respelling" the notes.

Thus it's possible to pivot on such a chord: music can lead up to it in a way that makes it sound like a B chord, say, and then the music afterward can proceed on the assumption that that was actually an Eb chord, jumping into a different harmonic space without disturbing the listener too much.

I like the ambiguity of augmented chords as representing the ambiguous or liminal status of the vampire, and also her specific ability (described several times in the book) of moving suddenly from one place to another, including into and out of locked rooms, without apparently crossing the space in between.

The waltz is not one of the standard dances of a Baroque suite. It started to become popular with the upper classes only in the late 18th Century, after the end of the Baroque period. To a lady of Carmilla's breeding, at the time of her death in the early 18th Century, it would have been a scandalous, sexualized dance of the lower classes she disdained - and it makes sense that in her early undeath, as she descended into her new immoral existence, she would have taken up waltzing.

Apart from the personal relevance to the character, waltzes and vampires definitely go together in general. A quick Web search reveals countless pieces of music with names like "Vampire Waltz," "Waltz of the Vampire," and so on. Many of them are not even in 3/4 time. Mine is more traditional.

The key sequence in this movement is from F to Bb, Eb, C, and back to F; basically descending a fifth at a time into successive subdominants as Carmilla drags Laura into her world. The Eb augmented chord comes in more as the movement progresses, especially at the climax, where it serves as the pivot back to the dal segno repeat of the first strain.

Also on this server, though not part of the Carmilla suite, are a few other waltzes I've written, mostly for electronic organ.

I call this a phantomia to suggest that it's horror-themed and to avoid confusion with the Disney movie, but it is basically the form of musical piece called a fantasia. Fantasia form means no form; it is a freely-structured composition that shifts between different moods, keys, and tempi. This one is an attempt to tell parts of the story of the book Carmilla, in music. It's a long movement that cycles between four parts, starting successively in the keys of B, G, Eb, and back to B again, that cycle of three different notes being the notes of the Eb augmented chord which represents the character of Carmilla and is used as a musical pivot between sections.

The book Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, is available for download from Project Gutenberg. This summary is only a summary of what I tried to include in the music.

The first section picks up the story in Chapter 4 of the book: Laura's family has a lovely new houseguest, but she never gets up in the morning, waiting until well after noon to come out and have breakfast. As the rest of the household is starting their day, Carmilla has nothing to do but sleep. There are quotes in this section both from the hymn tune Bunessan ("Morning Has Broken"), which if sped up seems to reveal its origin as a slip jig, and from the slip jig in this suite's last movement.

In the second section (also from Chapter 4 of the book), Laura and Carmilla are out walking. Laura and Carmilla are OMG Best Friends! but Carmilla, the more worldly of the two, sometimes says things Laura doesn't understand, such as declaring fervently that "You will die for me!" Carmilla's affection is also surprisingly physical, more like that of a lover than a friend, and the extent of Laura's imagination regarding such things is to briefly wonder whether Carmilla might possibly be a boy - but to quickly dismiss that as obviously not the case.

They see a funeral procession go past. It is for a peasant girl in the nearby village, who has been killed by a mysterious illness that is ravaging the countryside and rumoured to be of supernatural origin. The mourners sing a hymn similar to Haydn's Austrian Hymn ("Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken") and to Laura it is beautiful, but Carmilla cannot stand it, and it causes her to have some kind of fit or panic attack. She tries unsuccessfully to explain to Laura that to her ear the hymn is unbearably dissonant - along with comments Laura doesn't understand on the meaninglessness of religion. (This episode, straight out of the book, was a source of compositional inspiration for me: Carmilla's sense of musical harmony is different from most people's; alien.)

Then they are back at the castle. A travelling mountebank arrives and sells both girls charms against the mystery illness. Then he offends Carmilla by suggesting she would be more beautiful if she let him file down her notably prominent canine teeth. Carmilla says that as punishment he should be flogged and branded, but no such thing is in fact done. Laura's father is worried as the mystery illness spreads and more peasant girls die.

The third section corresponds to Chapters 6 and 7 of the book. Laura begins to develop the same illness that killed the peasant girls. She loses her strength and experiences a feeling of sweet lassitude, with the enervating sensation of moving through icy water. She does not resist, quickly coming to accept her approaching death. Laura has strange dreams, and nocturnally feels something like two needles being stuck into her breast. One sequence of dreams is interrupted by a voice that says "YOUR MOTHER WARNS YOU TO BEWARE OF THE ASSASSIN." At that she wakes, or imagines that she wakes, and sees Carmilla standing at the foot of her bed. Covered in blood.

The fourth and final section of the movement is itself split into four repeated strains, like a march. It starts with the arrival of a family friend, the General. He insists on immediately proceeding to the ruined chapel of Karnstein with Laura, her father, and some servants. Carmilla is absent at this point. On the way and once they arrive at the chapel, in the next four chapters of the book, the General tells the story of how his niece recently died of the same illness plaguing the countryside - the same illness now killing Laura. And the story, particularly the involvement of a mysterious girl named Millarca who came to stay with them, echoes recent events in Laura's own household.

The General is convinced that Millarca was actually Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein, who died more than a century earlier and is now in an horrific state of undeath. (In an earlier chapter, not covered by the music, they found a portrait of this Countess. She looked exactly like Carmilla.) He hopes to find her tomb in the chapel and finally destroy her. They search the chapel and then suddenly Carmilla appears at the doorway. The General recognizes her as Millarca/Mircalla, and attacks her with an axe, but when she grips his wrist he loses all strength and drops the weapon. She makes her escape, unobserved by the servants waiting outside. Another vampire hunter called the Baron arrives. With his help, they are able to find the tomb of the Countess.

The next day, Laura stays home in protective custody while the vampire hunters go back to the chapel. They conduct the trial and execution of the vampire (Chapter 15 of the book). The end of the movement, and the final chapter of the book, are a sort of epilogue: Laura, writing the story years later as a mature woman, reflects on this peculiar episode in her youth, discusses some points of vampire folklore including the name-anagram thing, and says that she still remembers Carmilla, almost expecting to see her again.

A "gigue" (pronounced zheeg) is basically what you get if 17th-Century French people watch an Irish jig and decide that that's really cool and they want to do it too. It's an energetic dance with a triple rhythm such as 6/8 or 12/8, and it is traditionally the last movement of a Baroque dance suite.

I wrote mine as a slip jig, in 9/8 time: three beats to the bar but each beat subdivided into three. I'm not sure how particularly relevant to vampires this movement is, but it's a fun bit of music, and putting a gigue at the end is part of the suite form. Also, Sheridan Le Fanu, the author of the book, was Irish; and I've made the tempo indication "Alla irlandese": it's meant to be a specifically Irish-style "gigue."

There's a bit of the vampiric Eb/B/G chord cycle (here in the form of Coltrane changes, that is, with a V-I resolution from each one) near the end of each strain, and the movement and thus the entire suite ends on an unresolved Eb augmented chord. Despite beheading, staking, and cremation, the traces of Carmilla never quite vanish.