Category: music

Creating something every day for 365 days: the music

Milky Way (Day 317/365)

Posted on by Dale

Ah, the first Saturday of GHP, when everyone curls up into a fetal position after lunch and recovers.

After a brief recovery, and after cleaning up the apartment and putting everything away, I decided to get some work done, and I chose to work further with the way Finale 2007 deals with parts. I found that I could edit the individual parts within the program, and that’s what I worked on all afternoon.

Later, after supper, I put everything away and went up to the dance. Every Saturday night the RAs stage a dance on Langdale Circle for the mouselings. There’s a different theme each week; this week it was the Twins Dance. Dress like someone else and come together.

Many halls decide to come all alike, so it’s not much twins as clones sometime. Still, it’s a very joyous occasion. The children, like us, are exhilarated that they have survived the first week, and they’re ready to celebrate.

Some images:

  • The hall that came as their RA, complete with bushy black philosophy major beard. (Even the RA was wearing a felt version of the real thing.)
  • Another hall that came as their RA, with open white shirt with upturned collar, and a lavender flower tucked behind the ear.
  • The RA who came as Georgia Hall, complete with little red roof hat.
  • Two boys in their hall’s uniform of wife-beater and jams, who did not seem to realize or care that they danced with each other the whole time I was there.
  • The group of boys (again, dressed as their über-preppy RA) in the distance, clearly dancing “in secret”: they were practicing for their entrance.
  • The RA who came as a bag of M&Ms, and all her girls were the M’s.
  • The song “Barbie Girl,” whereupon all the RAs on the steps of Georgia Hall turned their maglites on their dorm director, Barbie, a beautiful petite blonde, who makes no bones about her brains, her beauty, or her athleticism, and who immediately took center stage.
  • The sheer exuberant immortality of youth as what was clearly a majority of the students on campus danced and jumped and sang and hugged and talked their way towards hallcheck and lights out at the end of their first week of GHP.

A concert (Day 315/365)

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’m behind. Yes, this is being written two days late. No, I have no excuse other than working 6:00 a.m. till midnight trying to smoothe out the little roadbumps that are inevitable when starting up this program.

On the creativity front, I at least got to attend the GHP faculty recital, a splendid affair that might have been on the long side, but at least it in the “too much of a good thing” category.

Technology (Day 313/365)

Posted on by Dale

You would be forgiven for expecting that I would accomplish nothing today, what with ramping up the LotPDM, but such is my foresight, my planaheaditude, that I actually had free time during the afternoon.

And so I got to an item on my TTD list: extract orchestral parts for Milky Way. Of course this is not actually difficult; Finale does it for you. But I still have not done it in a very long time (and even then I wasn’t extracting a whole orchestra).

I dimly recalled that one of the improvements to Finale 2007 was better part extraction, so I was bold and opened the piece in that version. (You may recall that I stuck to the 2006 version because the plug-in that plays the orchestra doesn’t really work in the 2007 version.) Indeed, the management of part extraction is pretty incredible.

For example, the glockenspiel plays pretty heavily, but the timpani plays once, the bass drum once, the cymbals once. Actually I had forgotten I had put the cymbals in there, because I had used the wrong note and so they weren’t playing, it’s complicated, I tell you, and I may take them out, but there they were. It seemed to me that I didn’t need to print three different parts for those instruments when clearly it would take only one bored percussionist to handle them.

Finale allows you to combine those kinds of parts into one sheet, and it was quite intuitive as to how to accomplish that.

What wasn’t intuitive, after I had exported the parts, was how to make the parts show up on 9×12 paper rather than the 11×17 of the score. I could go through each of the nineteen parts and change the size of the paper, but that goes against my rule of repeating an action more than three times without technological assistance. My presumption is that a task like that is embedded somewhere in the software. It should do it for me.

Back to Finale, looking around the Extract Parts bit. It wasn’t there, but it was in the Page Layout area. You can actually set the size of paper for the score and the parts within the score. Apparently Finale 2007 manages parts as an extension of the score, which is cool if I ever have to make changes to the score. Not that that would ever happen.

So I exported them again. Then I noticed that nowhere on the parts did it say what part it was. Shouldn’t that have been automatic? Rooting around in menus and options gave me no clue, so I was forced to resort to reading the manual. I know, but sometimes it it’s necessary.

It appears that Finale 2007 will put the part name on the part automatically, but Finale 2006 did not, so if you’ve converted a file there were extra steps to take. That’s when I found out that you can actually pull up parts within the score file and edit them before you export them. Cool!

So I exported them again.

We’ll see whether that’s good enough. What I probably need to do is to go through all the parts and move all the little bits around (pizzicato markings sitting on top of measure numbers, that kind of thing) and then export them. Again.

Thought and news (Day 310/365)

Posted on by Dale

Two interesting things today, one for Moonlight and one for William Blake.

Having started some actual work on songs for Moonlight, I made a sincere effort to keep the lyrics for “Love Song of Thurgood…” in my head so that maybe others would come. But what I found myself doing was playing with melodies for the words I had.

This is probably a good idea. Hammering out words that fit some metrical scheme (which may not be apparent from the words on the page, actually) to fill out the first verse is a good place to start, and then I think if I can begin setting those words to music, that gives me a rather complete framework to start writing the second verse, the ‘B’ section, and the third verse.

Question: having seen the gist of the first verse, do you think I need to strive for any kind of character development in the song, i.e., we know more about Thurgood at the end than at the beginning, or we see some change in him from beginning to end, or is it going to be acceptable for this to be yet another comedy song? I have a feeling we can fill this show with comedy songs. Is that going to be OK?

In other news, I handed off the score to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” to Stephen Czarkowski, our orchestra maestro extraordinaire, to peruse. Never mind that I sent this to him in April. Never mind that I’ve been on pins and needles since he replied that there were a “few problems” and that he never told me what they were.

You understand my anxiety: I am a total fraud, without a real clue as to what I’m doing when I create an orchestral score of some proportions like “Milky Way.” For all I know, none of it can be played. Well, that’s not exactly true. I have some real knowledge of the woodwinds and sort of for the brass and percussion. Strings, though, I am quite in the dark.

I can look at a score by one of the masters and see that my music is not as “hard to play” as theirs, but I have no idea if there are certain intervals or fingerings that just can’t be done.

So I reacted apparently noticeably when, in a meeting with the GHP music department, Stephen says, “Oh, your ‘Milky Way’ score? There are some parts… Unplayable.”

Geez.

I’m thinking all kinds of horrible things: what if all those arpeggiations in the celli are just not doable? What if whole chunks of the thing cannot be played? That lovely music, everyone’s favorite, just gone because it’s… unplayable.

Geez.

He finally crosses my path again later this afternoon, bringing the score with him. Here, he says, measure 57, these two notes in the viola, out of their range.

And that was it? A part I copied and pasted from the second violins and transposed down, and never checked the range on? And I never heard the note was missing because it’s a complex section and the violas are doubling the violin IIs anyway? And I clearly never ran the plug-in that checks for range issues?

Before I could get too upset at the whole thing, Stephen says they plan to give it a readthrough during the sixth week of the program, i.e., basically after everything is accomplished and things are winding down. That’s as it should be, actually. I have no claim on the students’ time here at this program in this way, although I would like to think that might change after the readthrough.

But “Milky Way” will get at least an orchestral readthrough in late July. I’ll keep you posted.

Love song (Day 309/365)

Posted on by Dale

Aha! I did something today.

I could not bear posting yet again what a sluggard I was, so I forced myself to go for a walk around the Magic Square (that’s where we PDM live) and work on the lyrics for at least one song for A Day in the Moonlight.

I had had an idea for “The Love Song of Thurgood J. Proudbottom” recently that I thought I’d use to get me started: Thurgood and Alexandra are in the garden, hiding from their children, and it’s the occasion for Thurgood to sing to her. I am seeing a steamy tango, which the two dance.

After a very steamy walk around the Magic Square, I’ve made a start:

You’ll never know how much I love you
(if I can help it).
Every day and every night you’re on my mind
(I wish you’d move it.)
And… something something something
(like a pig in velvet)
‘Cause people say that love is blind
(And this should prove it.)

There: the start of a first verse. I’ve done something creative. Now I’m going to do something relaxing.

A couple more goals (Day 305/365)

Posted on by Dale

It was not until this evening, trying to clear off the sofa in my apartment here in Brown Hall on the campus of Valdosta State University, that I remembered that I actually have two more creative goals for the summer:

I am now taking suggestions for texts for either or both.

60 days to go!

Setting goals (Day 304/365)

Posted on by Dale

Enough whining. Having packed up my life for the next seven weeks, it’s time to move through this gateway and get back to creating.

Herewith are my goals for the summer:

  • Write at least three songs for Day in the Moonlight. I know I’ve got 15 or more to write, but given the realities of time at GHP, I’ll be lucky to get three done.
  • Learn how to use Logic Express. I’ve had this program since January and have yet to discover how it works. I bought a book, but haven’t had time to read it. I’ll do that this summer.
  • Contribute at least twenty-five items to the 100 Things to Do Before You’re 60 blog.

This doesn’t sound like a lot, but I’ll be lucky to do this much. Time is our enemy at GHP, and I’m usually lucky to get two hours a day to call my own. Evenings are devoted to activities or working with faculty, and that’s my usual time for working. Sunday mornings are free, and I have been productive in the past during this time. Mostly, I have to get my brain trained to work during the afternoons, between 1:30 and 4:00, minors time, when everyone is in class and I’m not usually out observing.

61 days to go.

Concert (Day 301/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tonight was the Masterworks Chorale concert, so that’s my creativity for the day.

We sang An Evening with Rodgers & Hammerstein, a packaged thing from the R&H conglomerate. Great tunes, for the most part, and some very interesting, lush harmonies. I was very intrigued by their “waywardness” in harmonizing what I remembered as very simple melodies. Of course, this may not have been Rodgers’ original scoring but some later hired hand’s work. Nevertheless, it was instructive.

One way in which it was instructive was that it brought to mind the comments of some “real” musician who had graciously agreed to look over one of the movements of my Mass in C, many years ago. There was one passage in particular that he furrowed his eyebrows over and made some comment about my having gone from one key to another in five or six consecutive measures.

My only possible reply at the time was, “That’s what I heard.” That is, of course, the correct answer to any such sniffing. But I might just as well have said, “It’s something I picked up from studying Richard Rodgers.” That might not have reduced the sniffing in the least, but at least it would have clued me in on exactly what direction the snobbery was coming from.

It’s a Monday, only on Tuesday (Day 299/365)

Posted on by Dale

[The blog has been down for two days, so this is late.]

We had dress rehearsal with Masterworks Chorale tonight, so that has to count as my creativity.

In other news, after three appointments and one session of uncomfortable tests, the neurologist Dr. Ni (no, I’m not making that up) has confirmed what I originally proposed to Dr. Smith two weeks ago: mild carpal tunnel. He wanted to do an MRI to make sure it wasn’t a stroke, but I suggested that unless I could walk out of that patient room and lie down in the machine at that very moment (“It only takes 30 minutes”) he would not be able to accommodate my schedule, especially since at each appointment I had had to wait for an hour. He had to settle for a CT scan, which was more or less my driving to PAPP clinic downtown and walking into the lab and lying down.

Moonlight (Day 293/365)

Posted on by Dale

Minimal creativity today, but it may be significant.

You may recall that one of the songs in Act II of Day in the Moonlight is a novelty song for Thurgood (the Groucho character), along the lines of “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.” Another novelty song from the same era, “Egyptian Ella,” has much the same flavor (see here for lyrics and here for a sound file) and it is one of my favorite songs.

I had suggested to Mike that he come up with some kind of bizarre female for Thurgood to sing about. However, it has not escaped my notice that singing amusing songs about fat girls might be a little, what, insensitive?

What to do, what to do?

And then this morning, the answer came to me, unbidden but clear: Thurgood can sing about any number of ladies with unusual features, as long as he sings about how he would never, ever sing about ladies with unusual features.

Piece of cake.