Category: music

Creating something every day for 365 days: the music

Too much music

Posted on by Dale

There is too much music. Not mine, of course. Of that stuff, there’s not nearly enough. (The other day, a student asked me how much music I’ve written. According to iTunes, less than two hours worth. Feh.)

No, there’s too much music out there. I say this because as part of my fragmentary composition exercises, I went to iTunes to listen to the opening of Vaughan Williams’ 2nd Symphony, “London.” I don’t own it, and considered buying it, but then I got sidetracked by his 7th, “Sinfonia Antarctica,” a stark work. I bought it, along with his 8th. Then I got distracted by the fact that a movement from Philip Glass’s 4th Symphony, “Heroes,” was the top ringtone.

I knew I owned that, but it was not in my iTunes collection, and then I couldn’t find it on the shelf. So I bought it.

At this point, I think my iTunes collection is officially bigger than my old iPod. And I’m OK with that. The new iPod Classic will store 120GB of music, but the fact is I don’t have that kind of space on my hard drive. I could put it on my external drive, but then my music wouldn’t travel with me on my laptop.

But that’s not what I mean by “too much music.” There’s just too much to listen to and to learn and to know. Right now on my desk are two stacks of CDs, waiting for me to listen to them again and get to know them:

  • Michael Harrison, Revelation, a microtonal thing, I think.
  • Brian Eno, Discreet Music
  • Philip Glass, Symphony No. 8
  • Philip Glass, Symphony No. 3
  • Einojuhani Rautavaara, Angel of Dusk (concerto for double bass)/Symphony No. 2/A Finnish Myth/Fiddlers, one of my favorites of the Baltic group
  • Peter Sculthorpe, Sun Music, Australian composer
  • Michael Danna, Skys, new age, I think
  • Erik Satie, Homage to Satie, his greatest hits
  • Music for Quiet Listening, a “Mercury Living Presence” reissue, featuring music commissioned back in the late 50s/early 60s by one Edward B. Benjamin, the Edward B. Benjamin Award for Restful Music, who apparently like me didn’t truck with the newfangled crap being taught in conservatories at the time
  • another, untitled “Mercury Living Presence” reissue, featuring works by Colin McPhee, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson
  • John Adams, Gnarly Buttons/John’s Book of Alleged Dances
  • Robert Baksa, Flute Sonata/Woodwind Quintet No.1/Quartet for Piano and Winds
  • Sergei Prokofiev, Piano Concerto No. 1 & 3/Bela Bartok, Piano Concerto No. 3

All of these I have listened to once, maybe twice. None have been imported into iTunes. And I just bought three new works to listen to. And I think there’s a small stack of CDs in my van that I’m supposed to be listening to.

The point is that I want to learn this music, especially the stuff that doesn’t appeal to me right away. I want to know it like I know the Beethoven symphonies, to anticipate what comes next. Sometimes that’s nearly impossible with the more atonal “modern” stuff, and sometimes I give up. But mostly I can learn almost anything. So why is there this huge stack on my desk? And why are there even more stacked over by my CD shelving?

It’s lunchtime.

Composing, 12//07/08

Posted on by Dale

I’m trying to get my brain back into “composer” mode, and to do that I’m putting myself back on a schedule, Sunday mornings and Tuesday evenings.

Further, as I listen to music in iTunes or elsewhere, I pay attention to structure, orchestration, etc., and make a note. I’m assigning these notes as “fragment exercises” for the duration. In other words, I’m not actually composing right now, I’m just using other people’s stuff as a model. In other other words, I’m copying. Think of it as a Renzuli phase II lesson. I certainly am.

My goal is simply to slap something up, to pour out the garbage and learn from hearing the stuff.

So, today’s fragment number 1 was “string arpeggios, agitato.” I think I was listening to the soundtrack for Pride & Prejudice.

(UPDATE: Each mp3 contains measures and measures of empty space at the end. Feel free to stop it and move on when the music stops. However, #3 does have one measure of silence after the first phrase. And I don’t know why #2 sounds so choppy.)

Here’s the mp3.

You will of course be alert to my dilemma this morning: this is actually pretty good. Do I keep working on it, only to bog down later, or just toss it aside and keep going? I worked a while on it, but decided to stop and move on. After all, the good work always waits.

Fragment number 2: “meandering chromatic piano line, high string accompaniment.” Again, I think this was the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack: mp3

Fragment number 3: “open fifths in strings, whole notes; countermelody in cellos/basses.” From the opening of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony #2, “London”: mp3

Fragments 2 and 3 are not as successful, but I think I got some interesting bits, like one measure or so in each. That’s all I’m after.

And so my morning ended.

A moderate bittersweetness

Posted on by Dale

As you probably know, because half of you are in it, this weekend is the Lacuna Group’s all-male production of Coriolanus. It’s going to be entertaining. You should probably see it.

But what most of you don’t know is that this weekend was to have been the international world premiere of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. In fact, at this very moment, we’d be at the reception honoring the production team, our international guests, and of course Nancy Willard, after what we can only assume would have been the triumphant opening performance.

Back when we were working to engage the community’s interest in the piece, we had to book the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts eighteen months in advance, and Don Nixon was more than willing to do that, so I found out when would be convenient for Nancy to come down, and this weekend was best. (It is Vassar’s fall break.) I marked it in my iCal. When the whole proposal fell through, I decided to leave it there so that I could watch it go by as time slipped away.

And slip away it has, has it not?

Sir Christémas redux

Posted on by Dale

You may recall, if you’ve been a faithful reader, that last year about this time I sent off a choral piece called “Sir Christémas” to the Welcome Christmas competition. Last year, the required accompaniment was celeste. (This year it was French horn, and I didn’t get anything written.)

You may also recall, or maybe I never shared, that after it didn’t win I tinkered around with it and reset it with organ. It’s been floating around out there, untouched since last fall, and now I have dusted it off for another round. I have added percussion this time to the organ accompaniment: tambourine, glockenspiel, tom-toms, and bass drum.

Here’s the score, and here’s the mp3.

I’m submitting it to the Masterworks Chorale for our Christmas concert. After reading through the stuff we’re considering last night, I figured that mine’s not as strange as a couple of them, as long as we’re being adventurous.

Also, today I put A Visit to William Blake’s Inn in the mail to George Contini at UGA.

I’ll keep you posted on both items.

William Blake’s Inn

Posted on by Dale

The University of Georgia Department of Theatre and Film Studies will be considering A Visit to William Blake’s Inn for their 2009-2010 season. I haven’t blogged about this and haven’t even really mentioned it anywhere, except at some point over on the Lichtenbergian site someone blew my cover and I had to respond. I haven’t even told Nancy Willard about it yet.

George Contini is a professor at UGA who moderated the panel on regional/community theatre that I spoke at last fall, and I jokingly suggested that his interest in computer graphics and projections made him a natural for William Blake’s Inn. I sent him a CD and a cover letter, and this past summer, he emailed me and told me he was submitting it.

The old gang got together last week at Craig Humphrey’s studio to record the work for UGA’s consideration. The committee requires some form of performance recording; it’s easier to hear it sung, even if shakily, than to try to figure it out by reading the piano/vocal score. I’ll submit the CD, the vocal score, the orchestral score, and a cover letter with all kinds of details from Lacuna Group’s exploration of the work last year.

I have to do this next week.

And then… I just have to wait to hear.

Everyone says this is exciting. I am not excited. I’ve had this piece shot down before, and I’m not holding my breath. If they choose to do it, then I’ll be excited. But getting excited about the possibility would be completely pointless, unless I enjoyed the agony of suspense and disappointment.

So there you go. I’ll print everything up on Monday, get the CD ready, and mail it all out sometime during the week. Then I can return to my current status as a non-composer, wondering if I’ll ever sit down with score paper in front of me again.

A little work

Posted on by Dale

I sent the unfinished “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba” to be looked over by the musicians. I had an ending to it, but it was silly, so I lopped it off before sending the rest of it.

I’ve been working on a two-piano arrangement of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” or as the Lacuna chorus always referred to it, “Ah, Number 10…” My reasons for doing so? It’s a beautiful piece, and it’s not going to get performed any time soon with the orchestral accompaniment, and the original “piano score” was actually a sketch using a piano voicing but is way too spread out to be played by two hands. Two pianos can actually cover all the notes, plus the ones I added when I orchestrated it. One piano would be easier to convince someone to do, but I’m sticking with two for the moment.

Anyway, that’s been going well, and it’s not hard. I just duplicated the piano part, and all I’ve had to do is go back and delete some notes, double other notes, and revoice some of it.

And today, I actually made myself do some abortive sketches for Maila’s Trio. Ironically, I went back to read the Lichtenbergian Assignment featuring the nonexistent work to get some ideas for it.

Here’s the fragment I got done today. It’s kind of nice, I think. Where the trombone is going to fit in, God only knows.

More double bass!

Posted on by Dale

In accordance with the Lyles Policy Towards Double Bass Music (that would be Grayson, and “more of it” pretty much sums it up), I have worked this morning on “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba.”

You may recall that last summer I wrote “Dance for Double Bass Duo & Marimba,” and it was well-received. And you may also recall that I have posited creating companion pieces for it, i.e., “Fanfare” and “Threnody.” That’s what I’m working on this morning. To be realistic, if I wanted it played this summer, I’d need to finish it this morning. There are only three weeks left in the program.

However, I’m taking a break. We’ll see if I get back to it today.

One of VSU’s cataloging librarians stopped me during preplanning and asked for a second copy of the score and parts to “Dance.” I had given copies to the GHP collection last summer, and had cataloged it for them for good measure. This particular librarian worked for GHP a couple of summers and is a nice guy; he wanted a copy for VSU’s collection, although both copies are shelved in the same place. You can see for yourself by going to the Odum Library catalog and looking up “Dale Lyles.” For kicks, look at the full display.

Anyway, that was gratifying.

What’s going on in Pan-Dimensional Mouse Land? I am, curiously, more often than not feeling that I am only a bit in this dimension. I am not disconnected, mind you, but I do feel more as if I were in more places than this, dabbling in the running of this program in one dimension while doing… something else?… elsewhere. If that makes any sense.

This is the All-Campus Chorus weekend, and we’ll be doing Fauré’s Requiem this afternoon. It should be quite lovely; the chorus is first-rate and practically had it ready for performance the first rehearsal on Friday night. (Half the chorus is made up of vocal majors and minors, but the other half just showed up Friday night to sing this weekend.) Pronunciation of the Latin has been a non-issue; notes have been almost perfect; even phrasing has been easy. That’s fun.

The strings/orchestra are really good again this year. The strings will handle the first half of the concert on their own, with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, which is a pretty piece; and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which is one of the most sumptuous pieces ever written. Given how well the strings knocked out the Holst St. Paul Suite last Thursday, it should be most satisfying.

I got to teach some Shakespearean nuts and bolts to Amy Cain’s theatre majors for the last three days, about an hour each day. We covered how to disentangle all those words by using our English grammar skills: find the root sentence, and then figure out the vocal arc of that. Then start adding all those clauses and phrases and lists and appositives back in, always maintaining the arc of the root sentence.

We glanced at Lessac-ian issues of vowels and consonants and airstream. We looked at how you could explore opposing emotional impulses using the same text. We worshipped at the altar of Maggie Smith, who is after all a goddess. I had a great time.

I’ve been wearing my Utilikilt since last week, a couple of days a week, and it no longer attracts attention, except for the random kid (usually a boy) who feels compelled to affirm my rad-ness.

Jobie’s been showing Lord of the Rings in the lobby of the dorm on Saturday nights. We’ve been having a good time with that, admiring the movies while taking potshots at them. A never-ending source of debate, given the jumble of genders and sexualities present in the lobby at any given time, is who’s hot and who’s meh.

Three weeks down, three weeks to go.

Not exactly encouraging

Posted on by Dale

From today’s Composers Datebook:

In the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is held by the “Gothic Symphony “of the British composer Havergal Brian.

This Symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until some 40 years later, on June 24th in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster.

Brian was born in 1876, to working class parents, and despite his talent and the encouragement of his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, and the leading German composer of his day, Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his “Gothic” Symphony, Brian’s musical career never caught hold. Perhaps it was class discrimination, or simply poverty resulting from the personal disruption of two marriages and several children.

Whatever the reason, for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity. With the deaths of Elgar and Bantock, Brian lost what little collegial support he had. Only late in his life did his work start to attract attention, when composer and BBC music producer, Robert Simpson, discovered his music and arranged for some performances.

By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and Brian died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.

There it is. I actually acquired the “Gothic” years ago. It is a huge, sprawling, messy, glorious affair.

Frabjous Day!

Posted on by Dale

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t written in weeks. It’s not that I’ve been busy, it’s that I’ve had nothing to say. I haven’t worked on any music since April, the news about Stephen not returning to GHP threw me for a loop, so sue me, and the meeting with Lee Johnson was interesting and fun but inconclusive, whatever that means, and most of my creative energy has gone into things that are better published over on lichtenbergian.org or lacunagroup.org. And there’s my annual early May funk, which on other blogs perhaps might be worth a whole week’s worth of posts, but I don’t presume that my irrational tailspins are of any interest, not even to me.

I might have written about Jeff and Marc and Grayson working on “What a Wonderful Bird the Frog Are” for the Masterworks Chorale concert tonight. I guess it’s important, since it’s the first time a choral piece of mine has ever had an actual performance, but really, “Frog Song”? It has a lot to recommend it (here are the score [pdf] and an mp3), but it’s hardly William Blake. They’re accompanying the chorus with “something percussive in nature,” which in their case means rubber mallets on a chest of drawers. If we can work out the finer points of the comedy before tonight, it should be quite amusing.

Anyway…

Today is the first, and only, day I have off between postplanning and GHP. I awoke early and got straight to my first task: cleaning my study and the stairs leading up to it. That’s mostly so I can drag down all the stuff I need to pack without tripping over crap.

Much of the stuff I’m straightening and tidying are not in point of fact mine. They belong to another person who lives in this house who, when faced with mounds of clutter, often buys containers in which to put said clutter and then puts the containers up in my study. So I was picking up all the family photos, framed, that have somehow escaped their containers when the interior decorator and this other person were scouring the house for stuff to redecorate the den with, when I came across this little black file box.

Since all this is in an area of my study that I don’t often go, mostly because of the mess but also because I don’t use the resources on those shelves very much, I hadn’t really paid attention to this box. I thought it was the old GHP box that my predecessor in the assistant director position had passed off to me. I haven’t used the box in years, as my systems and forms rapidly outgrew the box. (I will pass off a huge tub to the next person.)

As I looked at it, thinking I might actually be able to toss the contents, since I haven’t looked inside it for eight years, I also was getting some cognitive dissonance vibes: I remembered the box as being in another location, and I knew it didn’t have this translucent “pencil box” thing going on in the lid. What was in this box?

It wasn’t the old GHP stuff. It was the box I used to organize the score pages of Figaro for copying/collating for the cast. I had utterly forgotten about it. It was a thing of beauty: about a hundred file folders, the sturdy brown kind, each with a label printed out from a database I had created specifically for the purpose, showing the act, scene, the page numbers in the score, the number of copies I needed of those pages, and a check-box listing of the cast with who needed those pages. The file folders marched in even, unbroken thirds: left, center, right. Even I was impressed as I gazed upon it.

And in the translucent pencil box? A pencil, it looked like, and a sticky note pad. I opened it up.

It was not a sticky note pad. It was a cassette tape. With a shock, I realized what I had found.

It was Aces & Eights.

I hesitate even to write about this, since I’ve had very bad luck recently when I disparage anything. The internets is a creepy kind of magical place, and I just know if I write about this work, the original author is going to sense a disturbance in the Force and come looking for me. So, please, original author, who I am not going to name, thank you, just know that your work has given me untold hours of joy. In its own way.

Many many years ago, I hosted a theatre chat room on American Online called The Stage Door. We met every Monday night from 8:00-12:00 EST, and talked about theatre in our lives. Participants were many and varied: teens who would squeal about Rent, community types like me, professionals at many levels. We had actors, techies, lighting designers, musicians, directors. It was a fun time. That’s where I met Noah, who hosts all my websites. I met BrnySmurf, who yes, voiced Brainy Smurf and is now a casting director in LA. (He’s the smartass med student in the opening scene of Young Frankenstein.) Another regular was the music director of Guys & Dolls. Nicky Silver popped in every now and then, chatting about the woes of trying to find a gorgeous man who could act for Food Chain. (Silver, we finally did that show here. You owe me an autographed copy.) Steven Weber came barreling through one night, totally pumped up about the work he’d done on that day’s shoot of Jeffrey. Ah, the days when AOL was actually a community.

We also had a fair number of playwrights, and whenever they found I was the artistic director of NCTC, they’d ask if we took scripts. I always said yes. I guess those scripts are still down at the theatre. One or two of them were really interesting and we should have done them, at least in the Second Season venue.

So one night, a girl in the room realizes that I’m open to receiving scripts, and she enthuses about her boyfriend’s musical. Can she send me their tape? Certainly, says I. A couple of days later, I get Aces & Eights: a musical play about Wild Bill Hickok.

Oh my. I think many of you who read this blog have actually heard the tape, so you’ll know what I mean when I say that the contents of that tape were the most appalling collection of songs ever written. In listening to it in my van, I actually had to pull off the road a couple of times because I was gasping for breath. Yes, it is that bad.

I was supposed to return the tape, but I never did. I couldn’t. Here was the world’s worst musical, in my hands. How could I give that up? Fortunately, I never heard from the girl or her author/composer/lyricist boyfriend again. (Given my luck with this kind of post recently, I bet I do now. Pace, guys. You’re just going to have to forgive me.)

One can always forgive the clunky synthesized sound, at least I hope we can always do that, and I know that if I tried to record William Blake’s Inn singlehandedly with maybe Marc and Ginny and Mary Frances, that our end result might not sound any better than this. However, technical quality is not the issue. Artistic quality, alas, is.

Melody? Not so much, and he must have planned for Wild Bill to be played by Mandy Patinkin, since the vocal range on many of the songs forced him down an octave mid-phrase. Accompaniment? Leaden, or ear-grindingly repetitious. Lyrics? This is where the creator really shines. You have never heard such ghastly stuff in your life: sledgehammer rhymes, inapposite images, abandoned scansion, you name it, he kills it. Dead. Over and over and over.

After listening to it for a while, it was no longer funny. We all know what it takes to create something, anything, and even my sympathies were engaged. For a while. Then it became funny again, and it remains so to this day. I would bring it to rehearsals at the theatre at that point just before we’d begin running the show, when everything is falling apart and everyone wants to quit, and I’d play it just to remind everybody that no matter how bad we think things are going, we are not as talentless as these people.

In the creator’s defense, I have to agree with Grayson, who commented one day as we got out of the van: “He actually has a good idea, and all the songs are exactly where they need to be and are about the right thing in the script. It’s just that he’s no good. If he were talented, it would be a great show.” The great Lichtenbergian fear, indeed.

It must have been a couple of years ago that I decided I needed to transfer it to CD so that it wouldn’t be lost forever. But then, horrors!, I couldn’t find it. I thought I could remember putting it somewhere for safekeeping, but it wasn’t any of the places I would have chosen for that purpose. It was gone. I truly grieved. Aces & Eights held a special place in my life, and I was distraught thinking I’d never have it again. Worst of all, I’ve had to rely on my own work for bottom-of-the-barrel comparisons, and you know how depressing that is. (Viz., IV. Lento)

So every May, when I printed out my packing list for GHP (another database… stop laughing at me), there would be Aces & Eights on the list to pack, to get the VSU media people to transfer it for me, and I’d make another half-hearted attempt to locate it, but in vain.

Until today! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I am chortling in my joy.

A step forward?

Posted on by Dale

Next Thursday, May 15, I’ll be heading down to LaGrange to meet with Lee Johnson, composer. He was recommended by Jeff Baxter as a potential instructor for me, and he’s agreed to meet with me and discuss it. I’m taking the score to IV. Lento with me to amuse him.

In other news, last night I received an offer that was very difficult to turn down: the opportunity to collaborate on a musical version of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula, for performance this Halloween in Grantville or environs. Because of my longstanding commitment to A Day in the Moonlight, I felt I had to decline. But you can understand how tempting it was, from so many perspectives.