Mad Teddy's "March of the Spooks"

Mad Teddy's web-pages

March of the

SPÒÓKS
) ^ (

One day in October 2001, when I was "doodling" on my guitar, an odd little tune began to take shape. I typed the melody into Noteworthy Composer, and over the next few days added more parts until I'd put together an instrumental piece with which I could be quite pleased.

As I seem to recall, this started life in E minor (a very easy key on the guitar). However, when I transposed it down to D minor, it acquired a more "haunted" feel - much more like what I was after. (Another tune in D minor with a similar uneasy feel to it is the first movement of Mozart's 20th Piano Concerto, K451. Also, among these pages is my arrangement of Schubert's "Ständchen", which is also in D minor; this has a haunting feel too - but in a different way. Then, of course, there's the Cream classic "White Room" <...Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes...>, or Massive Attack's very moody "Unfinished Sympathy" <...How could you have a day without a night?...>. There's something about D minor...)

UPDATE, 12th October 2010: It's high time I added links to YouTube videos of the two excellent songs just mentioned. So here you are: White Room; Unfinished Sympathy. (Watch out for the attitudinal-looking dog in the sunglasses near the beginning of the latter - scary...)

The mental image I had when I wrote this was of a "gumshoe"-type private-eye character on the trail of some unsuspecting potential victim. Of course, it could equally well apply to a troupe of cute little ghosts like those you see on this page - or, alternatively, government spies acting on behalf of some paranoid régime intent on keeping its citizens under surveillance on the pretext that some of them might turn out to be "terrorists", or engaged in "sedition".

...Whatever! Feel free to form your own interpretation. Here's a link to the midi file, spooks.mid:

(To save this midi file to your hard disc, right-click here.)

UPDATE, Sunday, 8th August 2010

Just a word of caution: when I originally composed this on an older computer, it sounded great (if I might say so); however, on my current machine - which has a different sound system - the instrument holding the melody is nothing like the corresponding instrument on my old system, so that the whole thing now sounds pretty awful! So I've now included an .mp3 of the piece, which (fortunately) I constructed on my old computer before it died. (I probably should have attended to this before now, but better late than never!)

The .mid file may sound OK on your system - or it may not. In case it doesn't, may I invite you to use the following link to play the .mp3 version (~3.5Mb):

- or you can download it directly to your hard disc by right-clicking here.

If you'd like to see the musical notation with all the detail I included in the original, you can right-click to download the Noteworthy Composer file, spooks.nwc. If you go to Noteworthy's website, you can download their freeware Noteworthy Player, which will play the file for you.

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