Two ancient modes of mind meet at the heart of this piece: improvisation and pre-planning. From a handful of randomly drawn notes, a spontaneous musical Oracle is created — unrepeatable, alive in this moment. From that same seed, a carefully constructed Musical Canon (a type of “round”) takes shape, precise and inevitable. Inspiration and architecture. Moon and sun. Intuition and intellect. This is a
meditation in sound on how we meet the cards life deals us — and how we choose to respond.
Musical Oracle
Much of Life comes down to this:
we’re dealt cards we didn’t choose —
opportunities, setbacks, surprises…
all the things Life throws at us.
Sometimes we like the hand we’re dealt;
other times — not so much.
But our freedom — our human agency —
lies in how we play those cards,
how we respond.
It occurred to me:
what if I made music that same way?
What if I let myself be dealt some notes I didn’t choose,
and then shaped them — spontaneously —
into a piece of music?
So I made a card deck.
Not a Tarot deck, not a poker deck…
a music deck.
Twelve cards
for the twelve notes
of the chromatic scale.
And since card decks usually come with four suits,
I figured, sure — let’s do that, too.
Because… why not?
And let’s name them using the ancient elements:
earth, air, fire, and water.
Because… why not?
And let’s represent each suit with an animal.
Because… why not?
Eagle for air.
Dragon for fire.
Elephant for earth.
Fish for water.
I don’t know what deep purpose the suits might serve.
But at the very least,
they let a note show up more than once.
Beyond that… we’ll see.
So in the end,
twelve notes times four suits
gives us forty-eight cards total.
Meanwhile, the point of all this
is the ritual.
I shuffle the deck,
draw some cards,
and whatever notes appear
become the seed of an improvisation.
No prep,
no pre-compose and polish.
Just a spontaneous musical response
to whatever the oracle deals to me.
And since I’m recording these improvisations,
each one needs a title.
And in the spirit of this ritual,
I figured the title should be random too.
So I built a little song-title generator —
a fun bit of software
that picks a noun
and one or two adjectives.
It comes up with titles like
Lavender Mystic Fragment
or Lilac Sanctified Vigil.
I designed it with hundreds of thousands of possible titles,
which should keep me busy for a while!
I’ve put the link to it in the description
so you can play with it too if you want.
I call this whole thing
the Musical Oracle.
In ancient times,
an oracle was a place
where randomness met meaning —
where a chance event
became a message,
a clue,
a path.
Part of the inspiration
comes from the Zen calligraphers.
They would center themselves,
take one breath,
and make a single brushstroke —
no hesitation,
no correcting,
no polishing.
The point wasn’t perfection,
but a moment of genuine presence.
I’m nowhere near their league, of course,
but I’m drawn to the spirit
of what they were doing.
They weren’t trying to put on a show.
They were trying to meet the present honestly,
with whatever they had
right in that moment.
This ritual
aspires to something like that.
The oracle gives me some notes;
and I respond musically.
It’s simple,
it’s fun,
and for me
it’s a lovely metaphor
for the ongoing dance we all have
with the randomness life hands us…
and the way we choose
to answer it.
Musical Canon
One response to life’s slings and arrows
is spontaneous reaction and response.
Another is to step back
and deeply plan our course of action.
If the Oracle lives at the spontaneous end of the creative spectrum,
then at the opposite end we find music that is meticulously pre-planned—
designed from the inside out.
One of the oldest ways of doing that
is the canon—
a kind of musical sudoku
that composers have explored since the Renaissance.
A well-known type of canon is the round—
like Row, Row, Row Your Boat—
where a single melody is designed
to fold onto itself
and become a complete piece.
In a way, it’s musical DNA:
a tiny blueprint
that already contains the logic
of an entire living piece of music.
Once set in motion,
the piece unfolds from that seed
into its full form.
So while the Oracle is essentially unrepeatable,
the Canon unfolds through repetition
from its musical DNA.
Another way to look at this
is through how our brains work.
Two hemispheres,
each with its own gifts.
The right concerned with intuition.
The left concerned with intellect.
And in practice,
the two are always dancing—
sometimes the right leads,
sometimes the left.
In an Oracle,
the right hemisphere leads.
In a Canon,
the left does.
We’ve just had an Oracle
based on our randomly given musical fragment.
Now—
here is a Canon
constructed from that same fragment.
First, I’ll play the musical DNA by itself—
just once.
Then I’ll let it unfold
into its complete round form.
— William Zeitler
YouTube:
Notes
When creating the oracle, I have two computer displays in front of me.
The Pipe Organ
One display is dedicated to a virtual pipe organ. Great organs from around the world have been meticulously sampled: a stereo microphone pair is placed where a listener would sit, and then each individual pipe is recorded one at a time. The result is thousands upon thousands of recordings. Hauptwerk—the software that plays these samples—reassembles them into a fully playable instrument.
The realism is uncanny. Put a recording of the real instrument next to a recording of its Hauptwerk sample set, and I couldn’t tell you which is which. (Hearing a pipe organ in person, however, is its own elemental experience.)
My favorite is the organ at St. Etienne Abbey in Caen, France, built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (“KAH-vah-YAY KOLL,” 1811–1899), one of the great master builders in history. Here’s the console as it appears on my display:
Since the screen is touch-enabled, I can turn stops on and off just by tapping them.
By the way, the pipe organ is ancient—over two thousand years older than the piano (1711) and even older than the harpsichord (early 1400s). It was invented in Alexandria by Ctesibius (285–222 BCE), the same engineer who designed a water-regulated clock so accurate it wasn’t surpassed until Huygens’ pendulum clock in 1656—a gap of nearly fifteen centuries.
One of the hard problems in organ design is keeping the air pressure steady. Uneven pressure causes the pitch to wobble. Ctesibius solved this using water: bellows fed air into an urn partly filled with water, forming an air bubble. A tube led from that bubble to the pipes. The water’s weight created a constant counterpressure—a natural regulator.
Ctesibius also invented the keyboard—his early version had maybe a couple dozen keys, one for each pipe. In other words, he also gave the world the first music keyboard.
For pipes, he used the aulos, a double-reed instrument that sounds rather like a bagpipe chanter. So he named his invention the hydraulos—the “water aulos”—from which we get the word hydraulics.
These ancient organs were small by modern standards, but they already contained the essentials: regulated wind, a keyboard, and stops for turning entire sets of pipes on and off.
A water-powered, bagpipe-voiced keyboard instrument is exactly as loud as you might imagine. The Romans adored it. It thundered through arenas and amphitheaters during public games. (We still blast organs at baseball games, don’t we?)
As the Western Roman Empire declined, the hydraulis faded with it. But the Byzantine and Islamic worlds preserved the technology. And then, in 757, Emperor Constantine V sent an organ to Pepin the Short of the Franks. It caused quite a stir.
A generation later, around 800 CE, Pepin’s son Charlemagne commissioned Benedictine monks at Aachen to build an organ for his palace chapel. That project ignited a Carolingian tradition of organ-building — an unbroken lineage that would eventually blossom into the great cathedral organs of Europe.
This may be the oldest surviving pipe organ, dated from around 1100. (Reconstruction in progress).
Ableton Live
The other display is dedicated to Ableton Live, which I use to record my playing and to choose which instrument is active—organ, harp, or something else.
None of the software is generating the notes. I’ve set up the instruments ahead of time, ready to play. But every note you hear is played in real time by my own fleshy, imperfect, very human fingers. (And no fixing notes later, either!)
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