Here’s the opening number. It’s been done for about a week now, but I haven’t felt like putting it up for review yet. Made a minor tweak this morning. Again, I fear I am over-orchestrating.
Dream One, 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” | piano score [pdf] | orchestral mp3
That’s all you’re getting today, because I am now setting out to work in the labyrinth all day.
Occasionally, my lovely first wife and I will come up with silly—yet viable—ideas for television shows. Here’s one of our favorites: Mama’s Stuff.
The premise is very simple: each episode focuses on a family who is stuck trying to decide what to do with Mama’s stuff. See? Great idea—you’ve already tumbled to the possibilities, haven’t you?
Perhaps Mama is deceased. Perhaps she’s alive and downsizing—moving into a smaller house, or into a facility, or in with one of the children.
Perhaps nobody wants Mama’s stuff, or worse, everyone wants it.
Our hosts are comprised of an appraiser, an estate sale planner, and a counselor. You can see the need for the talents of all three, I’m sure.
Is there a Daddy in the picture? Did some of the stuff come from the Other Side of the Family? Are there relatives who want certain pieces retained in the bloodline, so to speak? Did Mama make off with some favored trinket in a previous generation’s episode and now Cousin Sally sees an opportunity to get it back?
Are some siblings simply unaware of the value of some of the stuff? Are some of the siblings… not nice people? Would the stuff clearly be better off in the home of one of the siblings (as opposed to the double-wides of the others)? Are any of the siblings hyper-emotional about Mama’s stuff?
Some episodes could be about the interfamily drama. Others could be about the sadness of a life’s end without any really meaningful artifacts left behind (and by “meaningful” I’m not saying “valuable”). Some episodes might focus on Mama herself; others, on the heirs.
With the richness of personality types (…) available to us in most American families, I think it would be easy to craft a narrative for each episode that would keep viewers coming back. And of course, we’d be providing a service for the nation by holding up these families as models of how to go about dealing with Mama’s stuff.
TLC, you have my email. Let’s do lunch.
So today I finished the patio landscaping with the paving stones for the back gate:
Still a tiny bit of mulching to do, but otherwise, the patio is done.
On to the firepit:
That’s a little over 500 pounds of flagstone there, and it looks as if it’s going to take another 1,000 pounds to lay out that area. Excelsior!
OK, I confess: I have developed an obsession with my new friend kaolin.
The discovery that I can have all the white body paint I want for practically nothing has me dazzled. Yesterday I realized that instead of dipping chunks of the stuff in water, I could go ahead and dissolve all of my holdings into an earthenware bowl. Even when it dries, it becomes like my own personal bowl of pancake makeup. Woot!
Of course, the dissolving itself was fascinating:
Isn’t that just grotesque? I love it!
Soon, of course, I will need to test it out to see how much it takes to cover my person so that I can make plans to create enough paint for our venture at Alchemy. That’s where I will draw a discreet curtain over the process.
I’ve been composing/orchestrating with some excellent results, but the intertubes have been destroyed, no doubt by aliens, so we all have to wait until tomorrow to hear the duct-taped glories of “Rise and fall.”
In the meantime, I will share today’s other small victory via the miracle of my iPad and the 3G network.
I’m sure everyone remembers my musings on the 3 Old Men ritual troupe, originally created for a trip to Burning Man next month and now re-aimed at the Alchemy Burn in north Georgia in October. One of the items I needed to figure out was body paint. (At one point in the ritual, we will be adorning our aging physiques.)
The real stuff is expensive, so I went looking for some home made recipes on the web. I found a really easy one, just cold cream, cornstarch and water. When I finally got around to testing it, though, it was not in the least opaque.
I searched again, and found a similar one that added flour. Good, I thought, that’s opaque enough. But the admixture was still just cold cream.
So what would be opaque enough? I thought about using poster paint, but who knows what kind of toxicity is involved there.
And then it came to me: kaolin, Georgia’s own “white dirt.” I asked Facebook where it could be bought, and I got all kinds of responses for local establishments that carried it. The winner was Food Outlet, where you can find it in the produce section right next to the okra.
Next step was to drag out the cold cream and shave off some kaolin into the mixture.
Nope, still not really what I wanted. (What do I want? Something along the lines of Butoh dancers.)
Today, casting about for something to do other than get out in the heat and humidity, I remembered thinking that I should try to dissolve the kaolin in water and then use that precipitate to mix with cold cream.
Was kaolin even water soluble? It was. And as it began to dissolve a little bit, I picked up the piece of wet kaolin and smeared it on my hand.
And lo:
So that’s it: carry chunks of the extremely cheap mineral with us, have a ceremonial bowl of water, dunk a chunk, and smear away. It doesn’t seem to rub off, and mere water washes it away. More research is required to see if cold cream might in fact give us protection against rain, although frankly I’m not sure I’m going to be standing in a long, trailing skirt in the rain.
And so our long national nightmare begins.
Having successfully copied the piano score parts from 1. “Let us joyfully gaze” into an orchestral score, I set about assigning instruments. You might think that this particular piece might be a lark, given that it’s just faux-Baroque excess, and to a certain extent you would be correct.
But it doesn’t sound right: too loud, too repetitive. I will have to let it sit for a day and annoy me.
Mercy, what’s it going to be like when I have to do something subtle?
I spent the morning attempting to discover a way to make Finale do a very simple thing: using the ScoreMerger option in the program, take the soloists/chorus/piano staves and append them to an orchestral template. In other words, take the music I’ve already written and copy it over to a file with all those extra instruments in it.
It would not. It would append, but then it also copied over the page setup, so that I’d have two pages of 11×17 orchestral score followed by x number of 8-1/2×11 pages of piano score, along with all the title page stuff of the piano score.
I could go in and tell it to forget all page formatting, but then the 11 staves of the piano score would end up in weird places: the sopranos above the soloists, or the piano staves distributed amongst the vocals.
And under no circumstances was it bringing over dynamics or tempos.
Blergh.
I posted on the Finale online forum, but so far no one’s answered, except one person who has had the same issues. Their solution was the same as mine: re-order the orchestral score so that the piano part is below the vocals (normally it’s above them), then copy and paste the piano staves into the orchestral score. Not difficult but hardly elegant.
That took all morning, so no actual orchestration got done. But the template is set up now, and I should be accomplishing something tomorrow.
And I finally got that little wall on the back end of the patio done:
When autumn ferns come back on the market, I’ll plant one there.
Soon, but not tomorrow, I will revisit the stone store and drag home some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate entrance, and for the area around the firepit.
I took yesterday off because it was such a gorgeous day, but I was back at it today. When last we left the remaining bit at the far end of the patio, it looked like this:
After a little work today, using some paving/wall stones I had lying about and the remaining flagstone, it looks like this:
On Monday, I’ll go fetch some more flagstone and finish this part up. Finally, I’ll get some medium-thickness flagstone for the gate area, and the patio area is largely done. (This will include some fern plantings in the new wall part, plus cypress mulch EVERYWHERE YOU GUYS.
So, Dream One is done.
Not really, of course, but for the moment let’s pretend that I have actually finished composing the first scene of the new opera, Seven Dreams of Falling.
It took me a moment to realize I was through. Honestly, it was like finishing a New York Times crossword puzzle that has resisted solution: you push and pull and step back and plunge in, and then finally you realize what the last few letters must be and you write them in, and then you’re done. No great “aha!” moment, no feeling of reaching a summit or crossing a finish line. You’re just done, almost unexpectedly.
Still, I’ll take what sense of accomplishment I can scrape up. Whatever its weaknesses, it’s done, and I think there are some very strong moments in it. Baritones will curse my name if they have to sing Theseus, whose opening aria takes them right to the top of their range and a little beyond, but everyone else should have a lot to please them.
What’s next? Scott is working on the text for Dreams Two, Three, and Four, and in the meantime I could begin orchestrating Dream One. I have a bit of a concern that I’ve not been thinking in orchestral terms, and that may be an issue when it comes time to get rid of the piano. However, the same was true of William Blake’s Inn, and it turned out just fine. The main thing will be deciding what orchestral forces we’ll need.
Side note: I just checked the instrumentation of Finale’s “full orchestra” template, and it seems a bit odd to me. No English horn, but an E-flat clarinet. Trumpet in C (2)?? I can understand not having saxophones, perhaps. No bass trombone. Percussion is timpani and “percussion.” None of this is a problem, of course. I just have to decide what I’m going to use and then create a new template from that.
For comparison, here is the orchestration for Anna Nicole:
That lineup is close to what I’ll end up with, other than not needing that many oboes or bangable items, or the jazz ensemble.
When I start orchestrating, you should expect changes in the piece, some of them quite significant. What happened with William Blake’s Inn is that when I started breaking up the piano accompaniment, I would hear opportunities for embellishments and counter-melodies that are not possible with ten fingers on a keyboard, and suddenly the piece would sound quite different. You can cover a multitude of joints with the spackling of strings.
So, onward!