Moritz

Moritz

Introduction to Moritz

Assistant Composer

Assistant Performer

Krystals 4.0

Introduction to Moritz v2

Moritz was named after Max’s terrible twin (see Max and Moritz): Max is a program which specializes in controlling information (sounds) at the MIDI event level and below. Moritz deals with the MIDI event level and above (musical form). MIDI events are the common interface (at the chord symbol level) between these levels of information.

Background

In the early 1980s, after working as a music copyist for several years, I made a real conceptual breakthrough, solving many of the Avant Garde’s problems in music notation. I have been trying very hard to communicate these ideas ever since, but this has proved to be a very difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, it is not enough (even on the web) just to provide good, logical arguments showing that standard music notation is unnecessarily complicated. I need to show that there are unforseen, interesting, concrete, commercially relevant consequences.
So one of the main reasons for creating Moritz is to help me develop these ideas to a point at which they will be more difficult to ignore. With Moritz, which is an open-ended project, I can build on previous work and create some concrete compositions, delivering some proofs of concept along the way. If the proofs fail to convince, I can push on further. Moritz is there to put the screws on. Whatever happens, the results will at least be unique. Maybe I’m just a Romantic Hero after all...

While the sound of these compositions will of course be related to my taste and the tradition in which I grew up, I am also hoping that the concepts will be of more general interest — especially to programmers working in more commercial environments. Nowadays, software is the key to developing any kind of music. For example:

Defining music symbols purely spatially suggests easier, more powerful ways to write user interfaces on the web and in both pre- and post-production music software, such as sequencers, Max, Cubase, Protools etc.
For me, the simple idea of developing an assistant performer (see below) was closely related to the insight that music notation is intrinsically timeless. Time is something in a performer’s brain, something he/she does in the context of an acquired tradition of performance practice. It is not something absolute, related directly to the symbols on paper, screen or hard disk.
Avant-Garde composers were unable to solve this (both sociological and technical) problem in the 1950s and 60s, and this failure led to the collapse of written music in 1970.
An assistant performer is something I need as a composer of written new music trying to re-enable the development of specialized performance practices and to wake written music out of its 41-year-old coma.

Future directions

Moritz’s future is very open. I'd very much like to:

Turn Moritz into an open source, team project.
Create scores which can be played in real time in browsers.
March 2012: The W3C Audio WG is currently adding MIDI to its charter...

Moritz in March 2012

Moritz’ opening window currently looks like this:

The Current Input Device and Current Output Device pop-up menues at the top allow the user to choose between the available MIDI input and output devices (see Preferences dialog below).
Assistant Composer: new settings and load settings open the Assistant Composer with a new or existing settings file.
Assistant Performer: perform .html or svg score opens an html or svg file for performance by the Assistant Performer.
Krystals Editor: open opens the Krystals Editor.
Moritz: preferences and about open Moritz’ Preferences and About dialogs respectively. quit quits Moritz.

Preferences

Preferences file: This file is always kept in My Documents/Moritz. On my system, My Documents is set to drive D:. Moritz creates both its own folder and a default preferences file on startup, if these do not already exist.
Local user folder: The folder in which Moritz expects to find and create the user’s documents. This location can be changed. Related folders are listed in blue.
Online user folder (URL): The location at which public documents are kept.
MIDI Devices: When Moritz starts, it scans the system for active MIDI Devices, listing them in the two upper boxes in this section. The default devices (the devices initially selected in Moritz’ initial window) can be set by copying their names into the lower two boxes. My system includes a permanently connected E-MU Xboard49 keyboard (input device) and a TS22 PCI MIDI sound card which I do not usually use. The user is warned if Moritz can’t find a preferred device (usually because it has not been switched on).

About

Introduction to Moritz

Assistant Composer

Assistant Performer

Krystals 4.0