My composition “Page 220” has been made for the collaborative music project Disquiet Junto.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment.

https://disquiet.com

The assignment for Disquiet Junto 0449 was to read a page of text from a book as if it were a musical score. My score for this piece is page 220, the last page of Mirlitonnades, in The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, New York: Grove Press, 2012. This page contains three poems, which are separated by asterisks. I read this page as a score of a composition in three movements. The first part is full of i-s and c-s, which I interpreted as two different percussive sounds. The frequency of these two letters is decreasing significantly in part two and in part three there is only one c. The frequency of these two letters is so high in part one that I decided that the first movement will have the two percussive sounds only. Part two is characterized am overall circle structure. The beginning phrase “silence vide” recurs at the end, but in retrograde form: “vide silence”. Correspondingly in my piece the same sound moves from simple to complex at the beginning and from complex to simple at the end of part two. The blank line before the last one I interpreted as a caesura which corresponds with a rest in the music. The i-s and the c-s are still the two different percussive sounds from part one. The final part again has a circular structure with three words at the beginning which recur at the end, but in different order. I assigned a different musical element to each the three words.