26 November 2009
Posted in Blog - Workbench

There's barely enough completed on this one to denote "in progress," but if I post it here I might be more apt to finish it!

The background, in short: I'm writing a book in which the main characters, two brothers, are (respectively) a musician and a professional chess player. The musician brother has plans to compose a piece of music in honor of his sibling's attainment of FIDE World Champion (should it ever happen), and the piece itself is intended to be an audio representation of the moves in the final game of the tournament.

So why not try it in real life? But as an RIA instead of a singular composition?

Why not, indeed!

Step one: calculating the tonal "map" of the chess board. The standard chess record is algebraic notation,which identifies each of the 64 chessboard squares with a letter-number combination. Files are the vertical measure, and they are labeled a through h. Ranks are the horizontal measure and are labeled 1 through 8.

My accumulated thoughts so far are 1) there is no way I can do this without using German musical notation (which uses the note H) and 2) if I also use scientific pitch notation, I might actually be able to make a tidy map without thoroughly confusing myself!

What now? Should every piece have its own distinct instrument, à la Peter and the Wolf? And what about castling? What about a piece taking a piece? Should there be an alto and tenor version of the doubled pieces (to represent King's Knight, for example)?

But first things first - if it sounds awful, there's not much point in continuing down the current path, right?

Bolstered by the beauty of the plan so far, I decided to knock out the first ten moves of the Game of the Century, Donald Byrne vs. Bobby Fischer. Notes only, mind you - no separate instrumentation...not even an f clef!

It looked something like this:

And it sounded something like this: byrne-fischer

Not a shabby start – with proper instruments it might actually turn into something! And so the work continues....

Psst - what does a pawn sound like?