maybe i should provide just a tad bit of context around the satanic choir.....

this isn’t why i failed the course; i failed the course because i didn’t even show up to the singing exam, because i knew i couldn’t pass it. but, as mentioned, the more correct way to look at it is that i lost interest in the department because they were forcing theory students to pass singing exams, and i disagreed with that on principle. i’m a little more moderate than i was back then; back then, if i found myself up against some systemic stupidity such as this, i just walked off and looked for something else to do. i didn’t have time to argue with them, i could just read up on the theory on my own. so, when i realized i had no choice but to sing whether i wanted to or not, i just got totally bored and disinterested and tuned out. or, you could look at it this way - if i realized that i had to pass each course separately to get the pre-req, i would have dropped the course before i failed it, rather than hope i could get 95% on the theory, 35% on the singing and have it balance out., to allow for the pre-req. i mean, that’s not ideal, but it’s how you deal with irrational requirements in first year pre-requisites – you just kind of plug through it, until you can get to more interesting material. that’s not how they calculated the grade, though...

so, when i said i picked all of the wrong notes, i mean that i did exactly what i was told not to do, and i did so in a systemic manner, across the piece. the initial piece was about forty seconds, or something – it’s slowed down here to whole notes across the board, and the tempo is cut to the lowest option in the scorewriter. so,  at each opportunity that i had to fill in a note for the voice leading, i did it exactly wrong, and i did this systematically – always the worst note possible, every time, no matter what.

i think that the assignment part ends when the solo philip glass influenced bass line comes in. i don’t really remember.

as the intent of the piece was choral, and the style of music is starkly christian in origin, there are actually religious justifications for the banning of the notes that i systematically picked that go back very deep into greek history, and are ultimately thought to originate in the pythagorean number mysticism cult. christian choral music has a very defined sound to it that we all know well, and the reason it sounds like that is that they restrict the notes you’re allowed to use, and flat out ban specific intervals. like, you could get excommunicated for publishing the wrong harmonic intervals – this was serious shit, partly because the myth (thought real by the religionists) was that the evil, scary intervals were legitimately channelling the forces of evil.

so, when i take a christian choral piece and i load it up with what i’m calling satanic notes, that’s not empty symbolism – there’s something very real to that description, in historical terms. and, it’s exactly why i did it, too. fuck jesus, hail satan!

it may be a tad cliched, in the broader scope, but my defense of such a claim would be that i’m not being haphazard about this – it’s truly systematic, and 100% completely, utterly wrong from a church music perspective. that gives it a little more depth, in that sense.

so, i hope that fills in the blanks, a little.