Noteworthy Composer for Choir

This blog entry details how I use Noteworthy Composer ("NC") as a tool for choral practice. To learn more about Noteworthy Composer, visit their website here.

NC is a simple program that lets you "compose" music on a computer by typing in notes using your computer keyboard. It also has the ability to open midi files and extract the music in those files into a score!!!

What a lot of people don't know is that a midi file may be composed of many tracks – one for each instrument or voice. When software such as NC is used to open the file, the tracks can be separated into different staves.

For instance, this is the result of opening a midi for "Be Not Afraid" from Mendelssohn's Elijah:

Cool eh?! The first four staves are for the four vocal parts. The 5th line is for the drum beat and the last line is the tempo track.

Now that NC has loaded the midi, you can change the file: you can change the instruments used in play back, you can change the length of the notes, you can change the pitch, the dynamics... the list goes on. At times I've been keen enough to type in the entire piano accompaniment to a choral piece which originally only had the vocal parts programmed in! (This takes a long time and I don't recommend it!)

For the most part, I use NC to do the following:

• Change the notes when (1) the midi file has an error or (2) the score I'm working with has somehow been modified from the original.
• Practice singing along with the piece until I am very familiar with my notes
• Replaying particular passages which I find particularly difficult (because you can stop and start at any place in the music, you can focus on difficult sections during practice - fab)
• Turning off my vocal part and singing along with the other vocal parts (ie once I think I know it, I turn off the soprano line and sing that while the other three parts play).

Weaknesses:

• adjustments to tempo and dynamics are rudimentary. This is a basic tool for getting a grip with the notes - not with the music.
• Although it is a simple program, there is a learning curve to get used to how to amend files. I've used several professional composition programs and this is by far the easiest
• Getting a copy of the program is difficult because they only send it out by CD – it's not available over the net

I find the midi files I want all over the net though recently I stumbled upon this site which is totally awesome for choral singing: CyberBass . The other great place for midis is Classical Archives.

Of course once you've amended the file you can save it back into midi format or save it as an NC file.

Notes about midis:

• You cannot play these on a CD player without converting them to wav format. You may have some software that lets you do that but it's unlikely. It is possible to use WinAmp to do this (play the midi to output WAV) but it is time consuming and who really wants to listen to a midi on a CD player?
• You usually cannot play midis on your MP3 player. Again you'd need to convert the midi to MP3 and this requires that you have the correct CODEC. If you don't know what that means then honestly me trying to explain how to do this will give you a headache! Go to Download.com and search on "midi to MP3".
• Midis are very basic files. Use them at your PC while singing along with your score. When you leave your PC, leave the midi behind and be sure to expose yourself to a real music version of the stuff you're working on so you don't end up sounding like a computer.

If you have questions, drop me an e-mail and I will update this note to answer FAQs.

Elijah Part 1: Demiurge 1 – Baal 0

The Creator God of the Old Testament, the Demiurge, was generally regarded by Gnostics as not the genuine ultimate God who is the source and "the depth" of reality. Since the God of the Old Testament is jealous, vengeful, judgmental, and undoubtedly masculine, [...].

Kelley L. Ross , Ph.D.

Enter the story of Elijah brought to life by the music of Mendelssohn as an oratorio. Elijah is an old testament prophet who takes on the king of Israel who is following a false God: Baal. The true God, not impressed by this idolatry, shows his character early on in the story:

For I the Lord your God, I am a jealous God
And I shall visit all the father's sins
On the children to the third and the fourth generations
Of them that hate me.

- Elijah, "Yet doth the Lord"

The people of Israel are sentenced to drought and Elijah goes into retreat. After three years in the wilderness, Elijah returns to take Ahab, the king of Israel, head on in a religious bake-off: You and your prophets prepare a bull for sacrifice. I'll do the same and we'll ask our respective gods to provide the light for the fire. Whichever god answers by fire will be declared the true god.

This contest appears mid-way through the first half of the performance and is the highlight of the story's action. Mendelssohn illustrates the excitement well with three successive choruses of the prophets of Baal calling to their god. Each cry gets more desperate but the only response is silence.

Then it's Elijah's turn and the Lord delivers: fire rains down. Now the crowd is positively panicked as they see they've been backing the wrong deity. The music takes on a frenetic tempo (the composer's directions literally say – "con fuoco" – "with fire"). When finally they realise that Jehovah is the true god, there is a beautiful exclamation from the chorus of "Our Lord is One God." It is touching.

But no sooner is this sentiment laid down, than the mood is interrupted by the bellowing announcement of Elijah:

"Take all the prophets of Baal and let not one of them escape you! Take them down to Kishon's brook and slay them everyone!"

Elijah, "Oh Though, who makest thine angels spirits"

There is little room for universal love and religious tolerance in the name of Jehovah.

The slaughter ensues. God, thus appeased, finally gives into Elijah's pleas for an end to the drought. When the rain arrives, the people thank God for his mercy, not mentioning of course that he's supposedly the one who brought the suffering in the first place. Part 1 thus draws to a happy close.

It is quite apparent that the creator god who visits humanity with the disaster of the flood is not identical with the "true God" [...]. Viewing the character of the deity of Genesis with a sober, critical eye, the Gnostics concluded that this God was neither good nor wise. He was envious, genocidal, unjust, and, moreover, had created a world full of bizarre and unpleasant things and conditions. In their visionary explorations of secret mysteries, the Gnostics felt that they had discovered that this deity was not the only God, as had been claimed, and that certainly there was a God above him.

Stephen Hoeller    

Notes:

• Felix Mendelssohn: born Hamburg, 1809; died Leipzig, 1847 after a series of strokes.
• Elijah was written in English from an English translation of a German libretto. It was given its first performance in English on 26 August 1846 at the Birmingham Festival, conducted by Mendelssohn himself. Mendelssohn (who spoke fluent English) took great pains that the English version would be as accurate as possible.