Exactly an year ago, I was writing and recording what was to become An avant-garde tuesday. As with all my other compositions, it began with a very simple idea, and took shape in one stretch of work, within the least possible time to carry out the physical aspects of making music. However, It’s unlike any other work of mine.

It was the most daring experiment I’ve had undertaken till then. A big leap from where I stood before. But it felt very easy, very natural when I was actually doing it.

There were countless debates going on in my head, about my values, beliefs in music. Months of contemplation wouldn’t take me anywhere. This song didn’t solve any of those problems either, but it gave me a new beginning. It let me start from a different point, on a new plane.

The published is the trimmed down version of a much longer recording, and with a slightly enhanced sound.

Download:

(mp3) An Avant-Garde Tuesday (5:45 mins, 6.3 MB)

http://soundcloud.com/ananth-pattabi/an-avant-garde-tuesday

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/81596

Score: http://imslp.org/wiki/An_Avant-Garde_Tuesday_(Pattabiraman,_Ananth)

Today, I came across Zynewave Podium, which looks cool too.

… and this is Energy XT. It works under linux too.

Darkwave studio is probably the only open source DAW for windows.

Though not free/opensource, a fully functional Reaper can be downloaded for free, without any feature restrictions. Podium has a free version with some minor(?) limitations. Energy XT demo version doesn’t allow saving. Nevertheless, all three of them are ridiculously cheap compared to their more popular counterparts.

There are some pretty interesting DAWs and Sequencers in linux. The usual ones are Ardour (DAW), Audacity (Audio editor) and Rosegarden (sequencer).

Non Sequencer is novel and beautiful.

That’s the midi sequencer. There’s a Non DAW too. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be under active development.

Despite its name, Qtractor is not a tractor-like software. Clean, familiar interface. Developed passionately.

As mentioned earlier, Carnatic Scores Repository is my attempt to notate and share carnatic music compositions, to make them available to every musician and student. At present there is a handful of Varnams and Kritis which are in progress. (They too can be downloaded as they are, if you wish)

Download:

From here: International Music Scores Library Project: Brochevarevare (Tyagaraja)
or here: Carnatic Scores Repository

A copy of completed scores will be uploaded to IMSLP, which is a good place for music scores. This page will list all such scores: http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Pattabiraman,_Ananth

Problem: It’s difficult to go through the musical examples. One must look for the recordings, or try to play them on an instrument (or sing). In some books, musical examples are printed in a separate section and referred through out the book (Refer: Ex. 1…). This makes reading the book unnecessarily complicated while the material discussed itself may not be that difficult.

Here are some fantastic resources, all Free!, both for listeners and music students.

For Listeners: to know better about music.

cnx.org: Sound Reasoning

Sound Reasoning is a web-based, introductory music appreciation course. It offers a new approach to music appreciation for adults, focusing on style-independent concepts.

Short-and-sweet descriptions and lots of musical examples ranging from Gregorian chants to contemporary music. A typical page in the course looks like this.

Sound Reasoning, by Anthony Brandt

For Music Students

San Francisco Conservatory of Music

This site has excellent supplementary materials for Harmony and Analysis. The school suggests Aldwell-Schachter’s book on harmony. This site has examples – scores & and associated audio recordings, for the theoretical matters discussed in each chapter of the book, with some descriptions. The examples make sense even without the prescribed book.

SCFMTheory.com

Interesting Sections from the site:
Be sure to checkout the Online Materials section, Aldwell-Schachter Harmony Supplements and Formal Analysis Supplements

Alan Belkin, composer. Writings on Musical Craft

Alan Belkin has written some very rich articles on Form, Harmony, Orchestration and Counterpoint. It’s very nice of him to share them all with us. These articles are online since early/mid 2000s. He says these articles are not meant to replace textbooks. True, but I’d suggest any student to go through the corresponding paper here before starting to read a book on harmony or orchestration.

Alan Belkin, composer. Writings on Musical Craft

More from Belkin: Principles of Orchestration Online, based on Rimsky-Korsakov’s book with the same title.
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… and some more

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Music_theory – Music Theory books in Public Domain: (Including books on Harmony written by Schoenberg, Schenker, Tchaikovsky, Rameau; and on Orchestration by Berlioz, Forsyth, Rimsky, etc.)

http://www.harmony.org.uk/

Table 1 – Varnams first words, correspond raga, the mela ragam it’s based on, and the name of its composer.
Table 2 – Number of avarthams in each section of the varnam (Anu Pallavi, Pallavi etc.) This is useful while playing second speed/Trisram etc.

Download Varnam Tables (PDF, ~ 20 kb)

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Another download – Full syllabus for music theory (AP govt music colleges, as usual). Scanned from hand-written pages. In Telugu.
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I’ve included the links in the main music theory download page too.
Carnatic Music Theory Notes/

Kalaharanamelara – Suddha Saveri – Adi – Tyagaraja

Score: pdf – 2 pages
Source: Inkscape SVG files for both the pages.

Download from Carnatic Scores Repository: https://github.com/ananthp/carnatic_scores

If you need the score, you can download the pdf, copy/print/share it. If you like to make some changes/corrections in the score, download the svg files, and edit them in Inkscape.

Background

Creating Carnatic Music scores is a challenging task. Tools/Software for this purpose are rare and none of them is quite mature.  People use word processors, spreadsheets and some times plain text editors to score. I did my bit of exploration. I’ve tried, apart from the mentioned methods, Latex, Lilypond (western graphical notation), and of late, Inkscape (vector graphics). Carnatic Scores repository will host the scores along with the ‘source’. So one can peek in to the source and see how I produced the score, try out the method and help me improve the score.

Most of Carnatic compositions are out of copyright. Still ‘scores’ are quite difficult to find, except in actual printed books, which may be still under copyright. For every song I learn, I’ll try to create a beautiful score and upload it in the repository.

Initially I thought it’s the wordpress vulnerability. Started cleaningup the wordpress installation, .httrack, plugins and themes. Strangely, even if I rename/move the actual wordpress folder, still the site continued to redirect to the spam site.

Figured out it must be some dns setting hack, I reset the dns zone settings, and viola, the site is up and running smooth.

Incidentally, I get an email from my host at exactly the same time saying “The malicious hacked pages on the site has been removed and redirecion to your blog has been restored. The site is appearing fine at our end. If you still see the hacked page, I would suggest you to clear your PC’s cache and reload the site in the browser.”

Now I’m not sure, whether I fixed it or the host.

Beautifulnote.com has been hijacked. Probably due to a vulnerability in WordPress.

When someone enters beauitulnote.com or beautifulnote.com/blog it directs to the hackers site. However, if we use the url of any particular post (ex. this post) we can enter the actual beautifulnote.com and access other posts, downloads and music.

I’m trying to restore the site by doing a fresh the wordpress installation and cleaning up themes and plugins etc. Meanwhile, please use this page as the starting point.