No one will be surprised to be told that the Yale Glee Club did not choose “Sonnet 18” as the winner of its Emerging Composers Competition. Do you think they googled me and figured out I was an old guy?
Excelsior! Or at least more basking.
Author: Dale
Worthlessness
The weather has been so gorgeous this week that I have been largely worthless in terms of creativity. I have come home, changed straight into kilt and sandals, and hit the back yard for some serious basking.
My plan is to use next week to work on my art, plus the herb garden and a little labyrinth work, so perhaps I can be forgiven for doing nothing at all this week. It’s been glorious.
In my defense, there is no better feeling than the warmth of the sun on your skin, and just now is perfect: warm sun, but not hot, and no annoying insects that require management. Just perfect basking weather.
The labyrinth is slowly reviving itself, looking greener and greener. The ferns have put forth fiddleheads and will soon be flourishing. The space welcomes.
Some days I’ve had quiet music playing. On others I just listen to the windchimes and the sound of the neighborhood. Sometimes I’ll catch up on blogs that are blocked at school. I’ve read an essay by Joseph Campbell that Jobie sent last week and annotated it. But mostly I’ve slept.
Somehow it seemed the right thing to do. You are always welcome to join me.
A manifesto
Labyrinth, 3/27/10
I got busy this morning and completed the eastpoint:
I added the cowbells I bought in Senoia a couple of months ago. At first, I just used rope, but the weight of the bells pulled the rebar posts too far out of line. I added the copper pipe as a stiffener, and it not only works, it looks good. Here’s a closeup:
OK, so the photos don’t do it justice. But there’s Air complete. The only real point to complete now is West/Water. Perhaps during spring break.
This afternoon was so beautiful outside, I just basked in the sun. Well, I quaffed a couple of quaffs of Xtabentun. But the afternoon earned it. You should have been there.
Labyrinth: the westpoint
For at least a year now I have planned to use some leftovers from the construction of the labyrinth to build the westpoint focus. These are the bits of the paving stones that I lopped off to make the curves of the turns. I noticed that if I put them all together they’d form a nice stone circle.
I immediately desired to put them at the westpoint of the labyrinth, as a kind of gate to wherever the labyrinth leads. (As Craig pointed out, it might also be a gate leading in.)
As I’ve thought about it, I’ve been amassing stuff to help pull it together, literally: cables, ties, etc.. My plan is to drill a hole in each of the pieces and thread a coated cable through them to hold them in place. (I know I’ve talked about this before. I’m recapping.)
Until recently I haven’t been able to see exactly how I would mount/display this gate, but traipsing from point A to point B in Savannah last weekend gave me the time to meditate on it. Lest you think I am able to actually meditate, let me hasten to clarify: my thoughts were more or less “if we came across the coolest garden shop ever and they had exactly what I wanted, what would it look like?”
It would look like this:
I want a flat, table-like stone that either has a natural shallow basin in it or that I can grind one into. This gives me the water I need for the West’s element. The shallow nature will keep mosquitoes from using it as a breeding ground, because it’ll evaporate before they can spawn. Maybe.
I’ll drill holes in the table and through the circle and insert rebar through as standards. Under the table, I guess I’ll wrap wire or use epoxy or something to keep the table from slipping down.
The next question, now that I’ve decided what it will look like, is whether the circle stones (which are actually just concrete) are deep enough to have a rebar-sized hole drilled in them. I’m betting not. I’m betting I have to go find actual stones to do this with.
A quest!
Ah, spring break
Spring break approaches. (The iPhone says we have seven days, 21 hours, and change.) So it’s time, don’t you think, for us to discuss what I should focus on?
I thought about hitting the music hard, but I don’t really have anything to work on. I have a couple of things to get in the mail that week, but they’re already written. As for the 24 Hour Challenge, I may actually restart that tonight.
Last weekend in Savannah, I was inspired by the art, and I thought then that perhaps I should spend the week sketching and painting, just fulfilling that Lichtenbergian goal of producing as much crap as I can.
There’s also the herb garden, it will be time finally, almost, to plant stuff, so that’s a semi-major project I can take on. Actually, I bought lettuce today. It was on my schedule to do so, a schedule that was penciled in when it was supposed to be sunny today. Oh well. I’ve moved it to Saturday. But that’s only the lettuce. The bulk of the herb planting will have to wait.
And there’s always the labyrinth itself. I need to get serious about the westpoint focus. If I’m really bored, I may do a sketch tonight of what’s been bubbling up through my brain.
There’s also the revamping of the southpoint. I have to find copper sheeting in pieces wider than the one foot rolls available at the Hobby Lobby, however.
The eastpoint still needs some development. I have the white paper flags, and that was easy. (Note to self: pick up the rained-on wads of white paper before mowing…) But I also want to string a rope with the cowbells I bought in Senoia between the two poles. I was thinking about some kind of semi-elaborate pipe/cap thing.
So, to recap, here are our choices for my energies on spring break:
- composing
- herb garden
- art
- labyrinth
Discuss. Be specific in your desires.
Mysteries
I have two mysteries.
First, this book has disappeared from my bedside. Utterly vanished.
It was there one day, and the next, it was gone. I am fairly certain that it was there one morning and gone that afternoon, but I cannot swear to that.
It’s the fifth in L. M. Boston’s gentle and intriguing Green Knowe fantasy series, and I had checked it out to begin reading it. I had it perched on top of a row of books on the bedside table, meaning to start it as my “churn through the children’s book” reading.
But it vanished. It would be insane to think that our housekeepers picked it up, but I have no other plausible explanation. I have no memory at all of taking it from its place to somewhere else where I hoped to begin reading it, and it is nowhere in our house. I have searched top to bottom, study to basement. It’s gone.
Anyone have a clue about this one?
The second mystery is even weirder.
This CD, Ed DeGenaro’s Dog House, was in the CD player in the kitchen. There is no case. Neither of us know the artist at all, and the music is not familiar to us even from a cursory listening.
Did one of you bring it over to play for me and simply forgot it?
Did one of our house sitters put on his favorite music one night and forget to take it home with him?
Maybe it belongs to the housekeepers.
Or maybe it’s all owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy, and I am the victim of its clumsy arrangements.
Ah, nothing to do…
This is an odd feeling: I put the “Pieces for Bassoon” in the mail this afternoon, heading to its two competitions, one in Illinois and the other in Massachusetts. Now I have no composition facing me. It’s that feeling of twiddling my thumbs that I have always found very uncomfortable.
It’s not that I want to be staring at another deadline, and I don’t have another piece ramped up in my head demanding to be written. It’s just that I’ve been relatively productive, nay, even successful, the past two weeks, and I’m feeling good about myself as a composer. Shouldn’t I then take advantage of this sudden burst of self-esteem and keep going?
The next thing on my list is a children’s choir competition in Italy, and I think I’m going to give that one a pass. I don’t really know anything about children’s voices, and I don’t know the quality they’re looking for. (Remind me to blog about dreaming a text for it.)
I think I will either dive back into the 24 Hour Challenge or go back to sketching ideas for the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra. It is not my intention to write that piece until this summer, but it won’t hurt to generate a lot of ideas.
And this last work has taught me that generating a lot of ideas is a very good idea indeed. Yes, I already knew that, but the “Dialog” movement brought it home to me in a nostalgic way. The “Heartfelt” theme, the lovely little bit after the bassoon pitches its fit, is a very old snatch of melody indeed.
After I wrote A Christmas Carol in 1980 (1981?), it was suggested that I write another holiday piece that we could do in repertory with CC, in case we ever got to the point that we were standing backstage whispering, “Die, you little cripple, die!” Not that we ever did that.
I decided it might be interesting to do an evening of short pieces. I don’t remember any of what we selected other than Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which is one of the most effectively maudlin stories ever written. I can scarcely type the words without tearing up. Damn the man.
Anyway, I don’t think I got more than a couple of melodies sketched out even for that one piece, and this “Heartfelt” theme was one of them. It was called “In My Arms,” and it was going to be sung by the Match Girl’s grandmother in the miserable child’s final vision of heaven as she freezes to death. (I recently read something online that indicated the writer thought the story ended happily. Hello??)
Go back and listen to that section. “In my arms…” were the first words, and I don’t think I ever wrote anything solid other than that. But the cognoscenti will recognize that I would have, if I had finished it, gone far beyond even “The Cratchits’ Prayer” in levels of rising gorge.
The moral of my story? Never throw anything away. If it doesn’t fit your current piece, you might, thirty years later, find a spot for it.
PBSQ3, 3/10/10
Cover me, I’m going back in.
Upon repeated, obsessive listening (a necessary part of my compositional process), I have decided that at least three portions of “Dialog” need to be longer: the Tango, the Chorale, and the Finale itself.
I’ll keep you posted.
_______
8:30, It’s now official. I’ve expanded the Dialog bits that needed more, cleaned up the scores, and finalized the mp3 files.
Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet, by Dale Lyles
II. Threnody | score [pdf] | mp3
III. Dialog | score [pdf] | mp3
I need an album cover. Somebody design me one.
PBSQ3, 3/9/10
Undeterred by the ministrations of the emergency room, nuclear medicine, and the cardiology staff of Piedmont-Newnan Hospital, I have continue to work on the piece from my hospital bed. (Yes, Piedmont-Newnan has wi-fi.) I’ll have to wait until I get home to play with some kind of ending, and I’m not sure the last eight measures make any sense yet, but it’s substantially advanced enough from yesterday’s version for me to post the new one:
PBSQ3 (Dialog): score [pdf], sound [mp3]
I’m liking this a lot.
9:00 pm, Done, for the most part. I’m sure I’ll find plenty I want to tweak, the last cadenza in particular is just a place filler, and there are plenty of places where I’m sure you’ll think, “Oh, I see what he wanted to do there,” even if I didn’t. But if I don’t get to work on it again before I have to mail it out, it will serve.
PBSQ3 (Dialog): score [pdf], sound [mp3]
And with that, here is the complete Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet: