Author: Dale

Musings

Posted on by Dale

Having slammed “Phoenix” in the mail yesterday to the Meistersingers out in California, I feel as if I’m accomplishing… something. Second competition in as many weeks. Wow.

True, last week’s was just the SATB arrangement of “Sonnet 18,” and this week’s was the mostly unsatisfactory “Phoenix,” but still, there it is. I have re-entered the world of competitive composing.

Next up, I want to tack on two more movements to the bassoon/strings piece from this past summer, in turn based on “I dance a club-foot’s waltz” from the 24 Hour Challenge, which I also need to get back into. There are two competitions with deadlines of March 15 to which I can submit that.

Yes, it’s simultaneous submissions. The day I win either competition, much less both, is a day you should all be worried about, since clearly the entire universe has changed some of its core functions.

Making time for this could be a little problematic. The social life is once again whirring up. Atlanta Opera tonight, if it doesn’t snow; Lacuna starts back up tomorrow night; the Wadsworth concert Saturday; Boys & Girls Club benefit on Sunday (Oscar party); math/science night at school next Thursday; and massive Masterworks weekend next weekend.

If push comes to shove, I’ll steal some of the nicer bits from “Phoenix” for this next piece. Might as well.

Phoenix, 2/28/10

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I’m going to live-blog this thing out of sheer frustration.

10:16: cheesy setting of I feel so helpless, but right now I’m feeling it. Setting All the familiar doctors/Touching the familiar folds is a brick wall.

10:21: got a rhythm worked out for All the familiar doctors/Touching the familiar folds. Now I have to segue from the pattern I’ve set up in I feel so helpless to something that will bear up under the lengthy line. Lengthy, however, is a good thing: I have only about 3:00 so far, and the piece has to be 4:00 at least. Who knew all this collapsed into so tiny a timeframe?

11:06: A death spiral phrase written. This simply has to be longer, so I’m going to break up the phrase and repeat it in fragments, actually setting up/anticipating the breakup of the water coda.

12:01: It’s patched together. I’m going to go have some lunch, then listen to it again afterwards. It almost coheres.

2:30: Lunch, Kroger, and now I’m in the back yard. I’ll share what I’ve got. Comment at will. I still have to construct a piano reduction, and there are some automations in Finale which will do most of that for me, print it, and mail it. They suggest a CD with a MIDI realization. I might do that, too.

“Phoenix”: PDF score, mp3 soundfile

It is four minutes long by the grace of unwarranted repetition. The last measure’s infinite repeat in particular nudges it over the four minute mark.

The knowledge that Mozart never felt this way in his entire life is very annoying to me. The fact that I have outlived him by twenty years is hardly consolation.

On a side note, I am ready for it to be a great deal warmer. I am weary of sitting in my labyrinth and feeling cold air on my body. I want the caress of the sun. Have another Carlsson’s Gold, Dale. Thank you, I will.

In another thirty minutes I need to go in and hammer out the piano reduction, then start the coq au vin we’re having for the Olympics Closing Ceremony Feast.

Well, at least I have a good start on my Lichtenbergian goal of churning out a great deal of crap. I wonder how much of this piece I can steal for next week’s continuation of the bassoon/string quartet? Discuss.

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update: Here’s the piano playing the piece. It’s almost tolerable here. Piano [mp3] (There are some minor changes from the score/mp3 above. One of them is fiendish.)

Phoenix, 2/27/10

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I didn’t post this yesterday because I was so disgusted, but as I work to finish the piece today, I might as well share what I nearly abandoned.

Score [pdf] | Sound [mp3]

Bleh. It just doesn’t work. But screw it, I’m going to hammer out the last third of it, duct-tape the “water” coda onto it, and mail it in. If they pick the thing, the joke’s on them.

Phoenix, 2/25/10

Posted on by Dale

I have lost my mind.

Since the atonal screeching of the first third of the piece was starting to get to me, I thought I would go work on the end, which I intend to have a gentler, more puzzling tone.

Well, it is that.

It is very reminiscent of one of my really great masterpieces that has never seen the light of day, the last number in the aborted One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish[1] , which I later used as the extended coda for a bizarre and demanding Alleluia. Only that piece had the sixteenth notes in the accompaniment and all the voices had to do was to chime in gently with “Now we go to sleep” and ending with “From there to here/From here to there/Funny things/Are everywhere.”

This is a bit different.

Score [pdf]. Sound [mp3].[2]

[1] Fans of my music will fondly recall “Clark” from that lost work.

[2] Those who are paying attention to the file names will notice that this is phoenixwatersketch2. Yes, there was a first attempt, a much more singable thing. I like this a lot better.

An unexpected answer

Posted on by Dale

In Seattle last week, we drove over to Fremont, a yuppie/hippie enclave full of funky shops and publicly funded street art. In one of the funky shops, full of locally made jewelry, decorative items and paintings, I was amused to see yet another jeweler making things out of old typewriter keys. There was TAB and SHIFT and :; and all the whole QWERTY gang.

But then I was startled to see a key I had completely forgotten about: MARGIN RELEASE.

Wow.

For those who have never had to use an actual typewriter—we’re not talking about those slick last-generation numbers that were actually word processors—let me explain the MARGIN RELEASE key.

First, you had to set your margins by positioning literal metal tabs on the left and right on a bar behind the platen. You also set tabs on the same bar.

Back in the old days, you had to keep a calculation running in your head as to whether the last word you were about to type on a line would actually fit between where you were and the margin. The margin would simply stop you cold in your typing, midword, if you miscalculated.

(Am I remembering correctly? Or was the little bell actually set to go off before the actual margin to warn you?)

If you did miscalculate, you just had to slide the carriage over to start the new line and then remember to go back and manually erase the foreshortened word.

Unless…

Unless the word in question was short by only one to three letters. Then, depending on the character of the document you were typing, you could choose to press the MARGIN RELEASE key, which, you guessed it, released the margin and allowed you to keep typing.

Nowadays of course the word processor does all your calculating for you. You just keep typing, and when the word is too long, it simply wraps to the next line. We live in awesome times.

I was brought up short by this artifact from my past. It articulated suddenly for me recent aspects of my life that have puzzled me and others in my life. The labyrinth, for example, seems almost like a Close Encounters kind of endeavor. Why? my lovely first wife kept asking as I transformed our barren back yard into some kind of alien landing site.

Why indeed? “Why not?” is not of course any kind of answer. I could only respond that the pattern appealed to me in some way I could not explain, and in the event, it obviously appeals to others as a space of refuge, contemplation, even power.

But now I have more of a partial understanding and answer: it’s a margin release. It allows me to push that button and temporarily go beyond the margins of my quotidian existence, to connect with parts of the universe that unfortunately are not available to me during most of the daily grind. However, my hope is that someday, someday, I’ll get the hang of it, and I can just keep typing off the edge of the page.

So I bought the MARGIN RELEASE charm, hanging on a silly ballchain chain, to wear as a talisman on my new Utilikilt. Look for it soon in a labyrinth near you.

Phoenix, 2/23/10

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I have set myself the task of composing an a cappella SATB piece by Saturday in order to enter into a competition the deadline of which is Monday. That means I have to have it finished by Saturday so I can polish it by Sunday and pop it in the post first thing Monday morning to have it postmarked March 1.

(I’m also submitting the SATB arrangement of “Sonnet 18” to the Yale Glee Club Emerging Composers Competition , that goes in the mail tomorrow.)

Anyway, I asked my fellow Lichtenbergians to suggest a text yesterday. Lots of good responses from them, of course. I really really liked Mike’s suggestion of Edward Lear, and was set to compose “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” or “The Jumblies.” Ironically, in searching my hard drive for the text to “The Jumblies,” I came across a list I had started back in 2008 of my Lichtenbergian goals, and for 2008, one of them was to set “The Jumblies.”

I began thinking of textures for “The Dong” and had given quite a bit of thought to it, using the voices as orchestral accompaniment along with the text, but I think it’s too long. The piece has to be 4—8 minutes long, and I was having to cut sections before I even began. I wasn’t sure I could get it all done by Saturday. It’s not strophic; Lear wallows in the verse without regard to regularity, so I wouldn’t be able to cheat by repeating verses like I did with “Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor.”

Fortunately, one of Marc’s texts was equally tempting, and a great deal shorter if, naturally, a lot more opaque:

I don’t want to be a phoenix.
I want to be something learning to walk
Like the corpse at a funereal dance.
I want to learn the rainbow’s backstroke.
I want release from restraint.

What to do?

The sky scares me.
Graceless hands reach out of the clouds.
Are these those clouds of unknowing
The books talked about?
Am I crossing into wonder?

What to do?

I feel so helpless.
All the familiar doctors
Touching the familiar folds
And I quake in the same cold ways.

Am I made of water? Why?

What to do, indeed?

Here’s my first stab, score [pdf] and sound [mp3]. It’s only the first phrase. I’m thinking of marking the opening wail Keening, because that’s what Marc would do.

At the moment, I have a vague plan. The first stanza will be fairly knotted, as you’ve heard, with a little loosening at “I want release…” but knotting back up with “What to do?” The second stanza will, despite itself, begin to cross into wonder. The second “What to do?” will be unable maintain its confident despair. The last stanza will be almost resigned to its loss of nihilism. I’m almost certain that’s not what Marc intended.

Thinking in a cappella is very hard for me.

What to do…

Posted on by Dale

Well, I’m back, sitting in the labyrinth on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. I have nothing pressing on my agenda, so that means I have tons I could be doing:

  • Finish the northwest corner of the bamboo fencing: that’s where the now-dead tree was in the way of the fencers, so they just plunked down a post, then spanned over to the wooden fence with chainlink. Very ugly.
  • Sketch. I haven’t done so in weeks, and the ELP calls.
  • Actually try to get the grass seed into the dirt in the labyrinth. I’m leery of doing the raking thing, because it seems to me that it would rip up the roots of the grass that’s already there.
  • Work on a couple of blogposts, including the most recent Lichtenbergian assignment.
  • Read Twyla Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit: life lessons for working together
  • Read more of Little, Big, one of the most amazing books I’ve read recently.
  • Rework the lighting fixture at the southpoint of the labyrinth from copper wire mesh to solid copper.
  • Write a charming letter to the editor of the Times-Herald, explaining to sports writer Tommy Camp why his tongue-in-cheek take on curling was full of it.
  • Just sit here in the sun and my new Utilikilt.

update: Just so you know, I mostly sat there in the sun in my kilt. I read The Collaborative Habit but found it not very inspiring, mostly because I have covered all those bases with Lacuna Group. I wrote a very charming letter indeed to the Times-Herald. They should print it.

Out of the office

Posted on by Dale

This evening, my lovely first wife and I will fly to Seattle, which will be our home base for infiltrating the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. We will be there for a week, so don’t expect any blogging from me unless I am overcome with the grandeur of it all and either borrow a computer from our hosts or assay the WordPress app on my iPhone. (I should try that now before we leave.)

It also means I won’t be getting any work done on the music I plopped out yesterday. Ah well, at least I’ll return home with a new Utilikilt.

At any rate, everyone behave while I’m gone.