I have the attention span of a flea so my personal projects tend to be short and sweet. A couple projects are exceptions. I am pleased to be wrapping up one of them after more than two years.
Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation) is one of my favourite works. I took countless music courses in college, but in the case of The Creation, I discovered it through Final Fantasy VII. ((The opening segment, ‘Die Vorstellung des Chaos,’ can be heard in Disc 1. A FMV shows President Shinra watching Midgar collapsing from his office; The Creation plays in the background. Haydn is given a nod in the musical end credits.)) You don’t have to care about religion to appreciate its depth and beauty. Haydn is music’s version of John Milton, in that he attempts no less than documenting the history of the cosmos.
I’ve been rereleasing public domain music under a Creative Commons license for years, all under the management of Mutopia Project. The overture to Fidelio was big. The complete Tchaichovsky Violin Concerto was bigger. The first of three parts of The Creation, though, intends to beat its predecessors to a pulp and leave them to die in the gutter. I only have a rough draft of the score ready, but it’s a clear demonstration that my efforts have paid off. Producing this draft may have taken 2.5 years, but surprisingly, only about a year of it was spent working. ((In more cases can I care to admit, ‘working’ includes time that I was interning and on the clock at the Federal Reserve Bank.)) The rest was sitting on my thumbs. Most of the time I was waiting for prohibitive bugs in lilypond to be fixed; sometimes it was just long stretches of laziness.
Copyright has also been a problem I’ve needed to work around; the edition I had been using is well away from copyright expiration, meaning I can’t release it without lying or finding a workaround. This year, though, came divine help. My father coincidentally informed me that the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin picked up a first edition score of The Creation, likely the same edition used at the work’s 1798 première. By adapting my score to this publication, I’ll be using an edition that’s been out of copyright for almost 200 years. Problem solved.
I’d be honoured if you gave the draft a look [PDF, 11.8MB], even if only in passing interest. I’ll upload the MIDIs later for a more practical source of enjoyment. Movement 1 (‘Die Vorstellung des Chaos’) is the big mama and will need to be rendered separately. I apparently forgot to do Movement 7, but that can be fixed with a few minutes of quick typing. After some half-assed proofreading I’ll make individual instrument parts and ship the whole thing off. The desired end result: the largest legal but freely available score on the Internet.