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This piece is a musical comment on the subject of an ancient Lithuanian folk legend, very much popular in Lithuania. The legend is based on the forbidden love between a fisherman (Kastytis) and a goddess of the sea (Jurate), their joy into a beatiful amber palace under the sea, with a dramatic ending when the amber palace is destroyed and the fisherman is killed by the god Perkunas. According to the legend, the pieces of amber, so easy to find on the Baltic coast, come from the amber palace. The first time I have heard about this legend I was surprised to find a typical plot that often appears in ancient myths, literature, and theatre of European culture. So I was inspired to write a piece about it.

This work is totally written with the Csound language and makes use of synthetic sounds only. I designed sixteen different algorithms, dividing the piece in three parts: the meeting between Jurate and Kastytis, the celebrations in the amber palace, the wrath of Perkunas. The algorithms include the following techniques: Additive Synthesis, Ring and Frequency Modulation, FOF synthesis, filtered noise.

Download this file to build The Legend of Amber into your computer:

Download amber.zip size 9890 bytes

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