Ver Calidus is a light and fluffy companion piece to “Ver Frigidus.” The six-note motif the song is built around is based on the chirping of a bird outside my bedroom window. (However, I hear this same chirping everywhere during the spring, so it’s probably a certain type of bird that does this, I just don’t know what.)
In writing this piece, I imagined lying in a field of tall lush green grass, staring up into the impossibly overwhelming expanse of blue sky. Above is the sun, and with it, intense, warming sunlight. Green trees wave in the breeze, white balls of pollen float in the air.
“Ver Calidus,” meaning “warm spring” in Latin, in a way represents the later period of spring right before it transitions into summer, where as “Ver Frigidus” (“cold spring”) represents the very early period of spring where it is still wet, foggy, misty and cold, even though the trees are just starting to blossom.
By the way, welcome, to my first update to the website in quite some time. Almost a year, in fact. Although I have a perfectly good explanation:
Recently I had to completely overhaul the site because it got lost in the combined wiping of my hard drive and transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Luckily I was able to retrieve the files from the original site, but I still had to redesign this site from the bottom-up.
That being said, this piece is still something I should have uploaded a long time ago.
The original composition, which was written in the spring of ‘08 for my AP Music Theory class, called for 5 singers and a violinist. There was one section I changed A) because it was too difficult to sing and B) because it sounded more fluid on a piano. This was the piece that was ultimately presented, using a recording of myself overdubbed 5 times and a live violinist. I was not able to record that performance however, so I did not get a violin sound.
Of course, afterwards I had a desire to create an mp3 version. But in order to do that it had to be changed. I realized as I was messing around with this that it wasn’t going to sound as etherial as I wanted it to unless I put an obscene amount of reverb on my own voice, which I did. This makes the rhythms harder to hear, but it sounds prettier. The only other downside is that it accentuates a couple of places where I was slightly off-key, but I have and had neither the time nor the desire to re-record it, so I left it intact.
The other change is that the violin has been replaced with a MIDI flute. First of all, as I’m sure you all know, MIDI violins plain old suck. There is simply no way to recreate that sense of tension and passion that a true violinist creates. So I needed something soft and relatively pleasing. The 6-note motif was initially based on the chirping of a bird, so I decided the closest thing I was going to get was a flute.
I don’t think the final recording sounds all that great, so I may revisit it later on, but honestly, I’ve waited long enough to post it so here it is. Enjoy!
Retroactive edit: You don’t want to hear the original recording. Trust me, it’ll make your ears bleed. Here is a more recent rework of this same tune, under the new name “Verdant Spring.”
Retroactive note: This is a more recent version of the tune, under the new name “Verdant Spring.”
