Gruntiferous Groontiferies

Some of you may have noticed the question about copyrights which I posted in the Off Topic forum eariler today. I wanted to write a choral piece based on vogon poetry, but I was advised by Robin for copyright reasons to write my own nonsense poetry (for copyright reasons). So here is what has resulted over the past few hours. I normally don't compose all that quickly but I've found that writing for voices makes it a lot easier (this is my first vocal piece) since coming up with melodies just involves singing the text! I plan on composing two more pieces to complete the set of "Gruntiferous Groontiferies".

The main influence on this piece would have to be ligeti's opera "le grand macabre". It is atonal for the most part, and contains some very odd harmonies. These harmonies are often based on thirds but also incorporate some seconds, tritones, and other intervals. I tried to capture the odd nature of the text through these harmonies. As this is my first vocal piece, my choral writing probably isn't very good, and I know that the piece is incredibly difficult to sing due to the harmonies. Tips, reviews, comments etc. would be appreciated.

I'll apologise now about my notation; it's a bit scrappy and hopefully I'll be able to fix it at some point.

Here is the text for the first piece. It's completely random, and half the time it doesn't even rhyme and reads almost like prose:

My froomsum fishfluxum
my parfsum reduxum
your minkled motions are a moo
like wanged woofles
overweeding tea for two

Warg, I am grootious
phototing fifty foods
partooting pinglepoods
I gravelly grovel geeps
while gruxums grovel gardles

Now I shall shoop you
while I shrinkenshap
all your shiftenshtarkens!
Fishfluxum you!

Thanks,

ClassicalSax

Could you enlighten those of us who are not aware, what is vogon poetry, and what are the copyright issues? (I assume, of course, that one question will answer the other.)

Looks like lettristic poetry where the words you use are made up, have no meaning and usually the attention is drawn to the way those words sound. I like to call it musical poetry. Here's an example:

Enfailed in the veral
Rudilated and yarrowed between the od-fernum bost,
and the rocal monus
Uls in zerbosity, Veron, the fonded quon...

Lol, I think you got an idea.

Alexandros

So, let me see if I understand... vogon poetry is a type of poetry, and you wanted to take an existing poem written in this style and set it to music, but instead wrote your own vogon poem to avoid copyright issues with the poet? Just want to clarify to make sure I understand where this is all coming from.

Vogon poetry is from the book "Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy", but as it is so recent, it is under copyright restrictions. So I basically made up my own poetry full of nonsense words which have no meaning. As well as sticking in a few English words which make no sense in the context.

Lookie: Vogon poetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia