Winters Journey is a song cycle by Franz Schubert. The last song in the piece is called Der Leiermann which translates to The Hurdy-Gurdy Man. The song cycle is epic, and sad, and this piece wraps it up with an ambiguous ending to the cycle. The song is to be sung and accompianied by a piano, but I decided to use seven tracks to express it. I used one track for the 5 meter grand piano to play the accompaniment without the bass. I used a bass guitar sample for the drone. I also backed the bass guitar with samples of a Fender Rhodes Mark II and also my distant grand samples processed through multiple echos. The synthesizers playing the voice part is multi-oscillator Moog’s using a unison box, double tracked with slightly differing tunings and delay settings.
It is my intention to record the vocal and mix it as well. I will record the vocal and process it through a vocoder to give an eerie feeling. Here is the text of the vocal.
There, behind the village,
stands a hurdy-gurdy-man,
And with numb fingers
he plays the best he can.
Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers back and forth,
And his little plate
remains ever empty.
No one wants to hear him,
no one looks at him,
And the hounds snarl
at the old man.
And he lets it all go by,
everything as it will,
He plays, and his hurdy-gurdy
is never still.
Strange old man,
shall I go with you?
Will you play your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?
Use the embedded SoundCloud player below if you would like to hear my rendition of this piece.