Category: music

Creating something every day for 365 days: the music

24 hour challenge #8

Posted on by Dale

From Jobie, 1-11-18:

The woods shall to me answer, and my Eccho ring.

As stated previously, this is from Spenser’s “Epithalamion.”

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/28/09, 8:40 pm

24 hour challenge #8, “My Eccho Ring,” for Jobie: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

This was interesting. I started out with a string quartet doing something completely different, and then when I was getting to the point of figuring out how it was setting the text, I decided to try something different and start over with the piano.

The start is marked ppp, so you may have trouble hearing it.

This is interesting to me, because I’m not sure I’ve set the text, but the music is interesting, and I’m getting a mildly sadistic thrill to throw something up that is so clearly a fragment and so very, very undeveloped. You can just hear the potential just bleeding from the score.

In other news, I went back and recorded the vocal performance for #6 and #7. They are exactly as you expect.

In other other news, I will not be putting up #9 today, because I will be celebrating the end of school tomorrow night and I know I will not be composing anything for the next 24 hours. Perhaps Sunday.

24 hour challenge #7 (and #8)

Posted on by Dale

This is interesting in a problematic kind of way:

Craig, in his never-ending search to crank it all the way up, sent 11-11-11. Since the first range of the first number is 1-5, it cycles back to 1.

So then right on his heels, Jobie sent me 1-11-18. See what they did there? They’ve put me within 10 lines of each other in the same poem.

Even more interestingly, that poem is Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion.”

It’s all about choices, innit? Do I treat them both as being from the same piece? Do I set them separately? Do I further explore the wedding song idea, and do I rip off the Renaissance again? It’s a puzzle.

On top of that, my time is actually booked tonight and tomorrow night, although I should have enough to squeeze out something. We’ll see. Midnight tomorrow is a long time away.

One thing at a time:

And teach the woods and waters to lament
Your dolefull dreriment

…which is lines 10-11 of the poem. We’ll think about line 18 another day.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/27/09, 7:36 am

Another early morning post, so no vocal rendition yet. I’ll get this one and #6 this afternoon.

24 hour challenge #7, “Your Dolefull Dreriment,” for Craig: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

This is a prime example of what I like to call “cheating through orchestration.” The accompaniment is so far from interesting that I’m willing to bet my lottery earnings that we can find its exact chord progression in half a dozen Baroque pieces. (Certainly the passacaglia-like structure is Baroque.) But hand it over to a plucked bass and vibraphone, and suddenly it’s self-aware and all cool and stuff. I’m OK with that. One thing I’m learning from this experiment is that it’s perfectly fine to take the easy way out. If these were real pieces, I would go back and tinker with them to make them interesting, but as it is, I’m learning to just spit it out without regard to quality.

24 hour challenge #6

Posted on by Dale

from Terry, 1-581-2, which gives us:

And spread the plague of gold and blood abroad:

That’s line 287 of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life.”

Mercy. What am I to do with that?

5/25/09, 7:13 am

24 hour challenge #6, “The Plague of Gold and Blood,” for Terry: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

Everyone is still asleep around here, so I’ve opted for a bassoon version instead of my usual bawling. In fact, I’ve gone back and added a bassoon version to all of the pieces so far, for those who want to hear the music without my personal interference.

I’m intrigued by the way these pieces get written. Since I’m not spending a lot of time on any of them, I’m going with the first impulse and then reshaping that as the minutes tick by. That’s one reason you’ve heard a lot of clichéd writing: I’m just going with the obvious. In this one, for example, the “Pines of the Appian Way” kind of ostinato is pretty hackneyed; the orientalism of the right-hand is kind of surprising, since the poem is about the depredations of Western culture, but there you go.

Anyway, I’ll try to get the vocal version done later. I’m now up to twelve requests. It seems as if no matter where I am in the process, I’m only half done. It’s also occurred to me that I will probably have to pull back on all of this when I leave for Valdosta.

24 Hour Challenge #5

Posted on by Dale

from Aditya, 4-594-27:

That thou mays’t know mee and I’ll turne my face.

That’s the last line of John Donne’s “Goodfriday, 1603: Riding Westward.”

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/24/09, 4:45 pm

24 hour challenge #5, “I’ll Turne My Face,” for Aditya: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

This one’s not very interesting, just a ripoff of late English Renaissance music, and very much a fragment of that. Competent, and for me, that’s doing good, but not inspired. Sorry, Adi: send me another challenge and maybe we’ll get lucky next time.

24 hour challenge #4

Posted on by Dale

from Emily, 4-332-17:

And I thought; this is their day,
how it breaks for them!

From “Epithalamion/Wedding Dawn,” by Michael Dennis Brown.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/24/09, 9:18 am

24 hour challenge #4, “How It Breaks for Them,” for Emily: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

The worst part of this project is having to hear my voice. I’m never warmed up, and I sound awful. That’s OK, I think the vocal lines are fine and would only sound better with a real voice singing them.

Anyway, this one is short and sweet, very sweet. No apologies for the unsophisticated approach to the very real sentiment of the poem.

So, four pieces down, and four more to go as of yesterday afternoon. I’m sure there will be more, which is good. I am actually enjoying this (except for the singing part.)

24 hour challenge #3

Posted on by Dale

from Mike, 2-777-22, which gives us:

… I dance a
clubfoot’s waltz, my legs driven by horsemen,
bones hounded by lust.

Thank you, Mike! That’s ll. 20-22 from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 15,” by Nathaniel Mackey.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/23/09, 9:46 am

Well, that was fast. I must have been inspired or something.

24 hour challenge #3, “I Dance a Clubfoot’s Waltz,” for Mike: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

I really like the quartet. The vocal line I’ll have to grow used to, although the actual line “bones hounded by lust” I think is effective.

I just learned with this piece that I can record my voice in Finale, which is definitely easier to follow the score with these tricky rhythms. That cuts out using GarageBand in the middle. Now if Finale would export an mp3, I’d be down to one piece of software.

24 hour challenge #2

Posted on by Dale

from Marc, 3-751-20, which boils down to:

‘Clay Boy, you never saw
some little old gal
get all hotted up
with one of those mean low-down
Gospel choruses?’

Lines 16-20 of Paris Leary’s “Love Lifted Me.”

This is going to be tough, because clearly this calls for some mimicry, and I have a Shubian shoot tonight. I’m hereby defining “24 hours” as “midnight on the following day.”

I have actually read this poem (my sources for this project are huge thick books; I haven’t read all of them) and love it. It’s a kind of narrative, which suggests to me treating this passage in a kind of operatic way, i.e., accompaniment with loosely fitting vocal line on top.

[If you’re just joining us, here are the instructions for the 24 hour challenge, as well as previous efforts.]

5/22/09, 4:05 pm

24 hour challenge #2, “Gospel Choruses,” for Marc: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with this one. A live performance would have tenutos placed over mean and low-down, but amazingly, those are not built into Finale. They’re not even mentioned in the manual. Incidentally, I am not singing a wrong note on Clay. That’s as written. It just sounds wrong.

By the way, I now have four more challenges. I’ll get to them as soon as I can. Notice I never said that this was a daily 24-hour challenge. I promise I’m not cheating by thinking about these before I post them and set the clock ticking.

24 hour challenge #1

Posted on by Dale

Wow, that didn’t take long. Turff, who has made lurking a point of pride, was first off the mark with 4-872-22, which produced the first line of P. J. Kavanagh’s “November the First”:

A long farewell:

See you tomorrow. (I’ll post the results here.)

5/21/09, 4:27 pm

24 hour challenge #1, “A long farewell,” for Turff: score [pdf], performance [mp3], bassoon [mp3]

My singing is quite awful. That’s OK, so is the piece. Everybody does understand these are going to be fragments of fragments, right?

Some new challenges

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been inspired by Mike’s 24 Hour Toon venture, so I’m going to set myself a challenge, more about which in a moment.

The other challenge which I’ve set myself is to fill a couple of pages of sketches of people’s mouths. (I thought about leading off with some statement about sketching “body parts,” just to set your filthy minds in motion, but why waste the time?) Those Lichtenbergians who’ve had their reference photos taken will be my subject.

After I do mouths, I’ll move on to noses, eyes, etc. I may do chests or thighs.

OK, my 24-Hour challenge.

  1. Pick a number between 1 and 5.
  2. Pick a number between 1 and 1082.
  3. Pick a number between 1 and 40.
  4. Email those three numbers to me, in order: 2-563-24, for example.

Here’s what I’m going to do. I have selected five books of poetry from my shelves:

  • The Best American Poetry 1999 (2000)
  • A Controversy of Poets: an anthology of contemporary American poetry (1965)
  • Master Poems of the English Language (1966)
  • Poems for the Millennium: the University of California book of modern & postmodern poetry, vol. II (1998)
  • A Year in Poetry: a treasury of classic and modern verses for every date on the calendar (1995)

Those are not in order 1-5, by the way. Your three numbers will give me: a volume, a page number, and a line number. If the page number or line number exceeds the number of pages or lines, I’ll do the modular math thing until I get to a number which is contained in the volume/page. A couple of the books have essays interspersed; if the page number is within an essay, I’ll move to the first page of poetry after the essay.

And…?

I’ll post the sender and the line of poetry (perhaps the complete sentence, if I’m in the mood) and within 24 hours, I will compose a brief setting of that line for baritone voice, i.e, me, and post it here. I am not going to compose an entire piece, merely that one line, for voice and piano (or if I’m really inspired, a string quartet).

If all of you email me at once, I’ll take them in order as I get them.

Let’s see how far I get.

Music, abortive attempts

Posted on by Dale

I had an empty block of time, so I thought I’d amuse myself by pulling up “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” and filling in the gaps where, in the choral version, the orchestra is not doubling the chorus, i.e., there is no melody present. There are only a couple of passages where that is the case, so this looked to be like an easy re-entry into my composing.

The first stumbling block, you knew this was coming, didn’t you?, was my old nemesis Finale itself. Somehow, whenever there’s an upgrade, it completely loses the ability to read its own dynamic or technique markings. There’s been a steady degradation of playback on “Milky Way” since 2006.

Actually, that was the only stumbling block. Filling in the gaps was an easy thing, or should have been. There were plenty of lacunae in the orchestral fabric, i.e., several appropriate instruments were sitting on their butts during those passages. The problem became, what the heck does it sound like?

Then of course the reverse fear began to haunt me: what if, rather than getting worse, Finale was actually getting better, and the lush, flowing orchestral piece of 2006 was in all reality a dreadful, clunky piece of sludge? The fact that it can’t play its own pp or mf or pizzicato is a comfort in this case.

Anyway, I plugged the holes and am considering sending it to Stephen for his perusal.