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july: legend one

Musical accompaniment is now written for many visual formats. Most of these formats (opera, movies, video games) tell a story; the music serves as a backdrop for the story.

The aim of the legend musical form (legend in the story-telling sense) is to re-invent this process: if music can be written as a supplementary element of an audio-visual story, why couldn’t the music be written first, leaving the story up to many possibilities?

Legend One, titled ‘July,’ is the first of hopefully several implementations of this form. It is a large work for chamber orchestra (instruments shown in as tags on this page) in 26 movements and is about an hour and fifteen minutes long. It is what I think of as post-minimalist, with each movement featuring only a few instruments.

The image is an illustration of the form of the piece in terms of theme.