Creating something every day for 365 days: the music
Today I burned copies of the CD for the seven members of the Jan. 10 ensemble, made labels for them, printed complete piano/vocal scores for them, wrote a letter of introduction/instruction, collated everything, and got them ready to go out the door.
So far, we have Anne Tarbutton, Denise Meacham, Mary Frances Glover, Ginny Lyles, Matthew Bailey, Marc Honea, and me. I’d like to have one more tenor just for balance.
Next, a guest list (other than Lacuna) for the evening.
Today I went through the whole score and double-checked the lyrics against Nancy Willard’s poetry. It is astonishing the number of discrepancies I found. You would think that after twenty years of working on this I would have the woman’s work memorized. You would be wrong.
Nothing egregious, mind you, but enough slips to make me go through all fifteen pieces with a fine tooth comb. They are all now corrected and ready to print out for a piano-vocal score for the small chorus to sing on January 10.
Minimal activity today: after I printed out the orchestral score of Milky Way on Friday, I noticed that the title was wrong. Since I had used Sun and Moon Circus as the template for my orchestrations, Milky Way still had that title, both on the first page and as headers subsequently. So today I’ve gone through to doublecheck all those files so that an incorrect title won’t be a reason for me to have to print out a score again. Didn’t take long, which leaves me time to consider other items.
For example, I’m thinking the tabloid paper (11×17) I used is not going to be big enough for a conductor’s score. The notes were tiny. However, the tabloid setting is the largest that Finale seems to handle. I guess. I haven’t installed the 2007 version yet. I have trepidations.
The good news is that last night I got an e-newsletter from Gary Garritan, he of the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds that have been giving me such trouble computer-memory-speaking-wise. He was letting us know that the German company who makes the Kontakt Player has updated that program to work with the new Intel Macs, and that he would have his stuff re-coded by the beginning of the year. This is a Huzzah, folks, because it removes any qualms I had about sinking huge dollar amounts into a new laptop. We’ll see what Apple announces in January.
Since we’re beginning to move forward in a definite way on William Blake, the need for the new laptop becomes real: I need reliable sound-making for demos and for rehearsal CDs and such. Also, orchestrating the remaining big pieces won’t be such a big hairy deal.
However, I also am going to need a big ol’ laser printer at some point to print the conductor’s score. Those are even more expensive than the laptop, and I cannot justify that expenditure at all.
In other news, I have watched two videos in the last week or so that have really inspired me. One was Uncommon Sense: the art and imagination of Nancy Willard, a short 2003 documentary of Nancy Willard’s artwork. She does these beautiful, unsettling assemblages, the people and creatures which inhabit her writing. (Yes, she has the Inn, and I’m thinking we need an exhibit of her work to accompany the premiere.)
The other video is on a DVD which includes Powers of Ten, a film by Charles & Ray Eames, the husband and wife design team. The other film on the DVD is 901: after 45 years of working. Made by the couple’s grandson, it’s a tour of the studio at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, which Ray had decided should be shut down and dispersed in the event of her death. Before this happened, the filmmaker documented the space and the materials and the work.
Both videos show what truly creative people can do given the necessary freedom. Willard does hers on a small, personal scale, while the Eames’s work was international in its scope and impact, but both involve the assemblage of disparate elements in often surreal but always striking ways.
It occurred to me that this is the environment we need to establish to work on William Blake: a studio of resources, both personal and material, that will feed the creative energies of the company. Easier said than done, of course. Both Willard and the Eames maintain huge stockpiles of stuff, the raw materials of their dreams. We have no place for that. Any storyboarding/flowcharting we do has to be stowed before we leave and put back up the next time we work. That’s going to hamper us in small but definite ways.
What we need is a storefront somewhere we can use for the next year or so to get this thing ready. Yep, that’s what we need all right.
Done, for a ducat!
The orchestration of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way is done. Or at least the first draft is done. There are still a couple of measures that I’m sure I will revisit, but for now, it’s finished.
Here is the mp3 of the completed orchestration.
So, what next? Here are our choices:
I rather think I’ll leave Marmalade Man till last, since it’s already mostly orchestrated. What does everyone else think?
Only six blank measures to go in Milky Way!
I’ve smoothed out the rat’s issues and moved into and through the final stanza, and even into the coda, which is just a repeat of mm. 68-69. Since the next two measures are just a repeat of those measures, transposed up a sixth, I should be able to finish this piece on Sunday morning.
I’ve developed this sense of completion, of being finished in some way, which is stupid, since although Milky Way is the last piece I composed (always excepting the Epilogue), I still have Marmalade Man, Make Way, and Tale of the Tailor to orchestrate. I have a long way to go before I sleep!
Still, I don’t expect any of them to have the issues that Milky Way has presented. They are pretty straightforward, without the shifting moods of this piece. They also don’t present issues of delicacy, transparency, grandeur, profundity, etc., that a walk across the night sky might.
By the way, anyone who is interested in hearing A Visit to William Blake’s Inn played through in its entirety is invited to come to the Newnan School of Dance on Wednesday, January 10, at 7:00. For full details, see the Lacuna Group.
Tonight was the Masterworks concert, so that was going to count as my creativity for the day, and it was a very good concert, but then something unexpected happened.
After the concert, Ginny was supposed to meet up with her book club buddies for coffee, but she had read the invitation wrong, so we came home and got comfortable. Soon, though, Bette Hickman showed up looking for Ginny, and we all went out for a late supper. While Ginny changed back into clothes, I dragged Bette upstairs to hear Milky Way and to let her know we were going to move on this starting in January.
She liked the music, and over supper we talked about getting all the necessary ducks in a row. So the piece of the puzzle over which I had no control, i.e., the machinery necessary to procure space/funding/backing, is in place.
All in all, a very creative evening.
early morning: Many days when I report that I’ve done “nothing,” I’ve actually done quite a bit of work in my head, going over sections of William Blake that need work, listening to the CD in the car and making decisions about instrumentation or effects or stuff (that’s a technical term.)
Thus it was this morning that as I was finishing my toilette I decided that maybe the section in question in Milky Way needed some other sound completely. I think I’m going to yank the strings entirely. I can give the cello line to the bassoons and drop the horns into the bass clef to cover what the violas were handling. I keep forgetting that the horns have this ungodly range. In fact, I keep wondering whether I need trombones at all, just add another two horns and keep them in the bass clef.
At any rate, I’ll see if I can get this done tonight and report back.
late evening: Actually, I think that was it. I didn’t use the horns like I thought I would, but the woodwind choir fits the bill quite nicely. The strings join back in on the “gathered by fools in heaven” line, and it moves smoothly on.
So now I need to orchestrate the little descending star patterns leading into the final repeat of the “intro” theme, and then hopefully I know what I’m doing from there to the end.
I’m having real problems with mm. 76-80 of Milky Way, the rat’s sullen complaint and prediction, “What’s gathered by fools in heaven will never endure.”
I want it to sound low and sullen so that the final quatrain sounds elated, but it just sounds gawky and unpleasant. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my orchestration style in this piece can only be described as “pointillistic” or “mosaic-like,” i.e., instruments enter willy-nilly to provide color and then just as suddenly drop out again. But this passage just sounds clumsy.
I thought about taking the low strings and making them pizzicato, but I’m not sure that cellos can actually pluck that kind of sequence, quickly arpeggiated sixteenth notes. Perhaps they could divide them up?
Part of the problem also is that I’ve scored it in patches, so that there’s truly not a smooth transition from one measure to the next, and whole voices just disappear.
It’s all a matter of balance, I suppose, and finding the will to tinker with it. I’m so close to the end!!
I got back to work on Milky Way today, hacking my way through the rat’s sullen complaining. If I can adhere to some kind of schedule, I should be through with this piece by next weekend. Then it’s just Make Way and Tale of the Tailor for orchestration. (Marmalade Man was conceived in practically full orchestration already. Piece of cake.)
I have not posted any updated mp3s for that.
Tonight, I went to Amazon to find a book of poetry of Nancy Willard’s called In a Salt Marsh, a poem from which was sent by Knopf Poetry as part of its April Poetry Month emails this past spring. While I was there, I looked at some of her other books, and there was one from last year of which I had been unaware. It’s called Sweep Dreams, and it’s illustrated by Mary GrandPré.
First of all, of course, Mary GrandPré is the illustrator of the American editions of Harry Potter, but more than that, she is the sister of Tom GrandPré, aka Captain Shubian himself. Can we all say Six Degrees?