Writing songs - music for voice and piano - is generally a lot of fun. But finding the proper text can really be a nightmare. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I stumbled across these science writings by Vilhelm Bjerknes, but I immediately knew that they were perfect for my Density Songs.
I’m not just being obscure for obscurity’s sake here - I find the text extraordinarily poetic. The language of science is suggestive and intriguing, but it keeps me at a distance. The words are all familiar, yet their meaning is elusive (at least without extensive training in physics). Vectors, surfaces of separation, changing fields, and the constant flux all seem to be hinting at something just beyond my reach as a reader, a sensation that I find somewhat awesome.
Each of the songs takes a different approach to the text; the first bounces between moods, the second is rather serious and meditative, and the final is a bit mindless and robotic. Feel free to read deeper meanings into the text and their settings as you see fit.
Density Songs
1. Properties of the field vectors at a surface of separation.
2. Intrinsically polarized and oscillating bodies.
3. Influence of heterogeneities in the electric or magnetic and in the anologous hydrodynamic field.
Text by Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes
from Fields of force; supplementary lectures, applications to meteorology; a course of lectures in mathematical physics delivered December 1 to 23, 1905
1. Properties of the field vectors at a surface of separation.
A characteristic geometrical property
of the vectors
at a surface of separation
of two media
shows at once
how the fluxes and field intensities
should be paired
with the hydrodynamic vectors.
As is well known,
at a surface of separation
the normal component of the flux
is always continuous,
while the normal component
of the field intensity
is necessarily discontinuous,
if the inductivity
suddenly changes
at the surface.
On the other hand,
at any surface of separation
in a moving liquid
the normal component of the velocity
is continuous,
corresponding to
the normal component of the flux.
2. Intrinsically polarized and oscillating bodies.
What we have said of electrified particles
and the electric fields produced by them
may be repeated for magnetic poles
and the corresponding magnetic fields.
But now the reservation must be made,
that magnetic poles
are in reality mere fictions.
3. Influence of heterogeneities in the electric or magnetic and in the anologous hydrodynamic field.
From the principle of kinetic buoyancy
we thus find the obvious law,
that, in a heterogeneous fluid,
masses of greater mobility
take greater velocities.
The mobility
therefore
influences the distribution of velocity,
just as the inductivity
influences the distribution of the flux
in the electric, or magnetic
field.
For at places of greater inductivity
we have greater electric, or magnetic
flux.
Density Songs
composed in 2008 - for soprano and piano
