Jonathan Shaw

Composed: 28th November 2016

     These next two, “C.106” and “C.107”, I had nearly forgotten about.

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    They were two small tracks written for an indie video game I was working on, “Wrath of the Abyss”. The developer asked for numerous ambience track for dungeons, one of which called for a “Monastic Chanting”. Therefore, I wrote two small chanting compositions using familiar Latin phrases, and then created recordings of them (complete with my own singing!)

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     This first chanting track was based on the famous “Dies Irae”. It was, of course, scored in D, but it did not contain the renowned “Dies Irae Melody”:

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     Instead, it uses very simple modal phrases based on D Dorian, with its characteristic B-natural. I would have thought I was using the rules of Fuxian counterpoint to construct these chants, but after finding a couple leaps of a diminished 4th tritone (the infamous “Diabolus in Musica”), it seems I disregarded the rules.

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     Regarding instrumentation, there is a long organ pedal on the tonic down below, which I recorded on my local church organ. The voices are a combination of my own (recorded in as many different voices as I could create) and EastWest Choir samples with WordBuilder. The result is a rather unrealistic large choir chanting the text.

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     But this was not the first chant I was to construct.