All I was able to do today was to create a database of Masterworks Chorale members, update the website, make name badges for everyone, and get to rehearsal.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
An EVENT (Day 48/365)
Last month, PBS stations everywhere were begging for bucks, and I noticed this ad for NYC’s channel 13 in the Arts section of the paper: “Yanni Live! The Concert Event: onstage in Vegas, first TV appearance in eight years!”
Let’s ignore the fact that Yanni hasn’t had a hit in God knows how many years. Let’s ignore the fact that a live performance from the Met or a revival of Dance in America would be far more likely to move me to write sizable checks to PBS. Let’s ignore the fact that I actually own four Yanni CDs, but nothing recent, and none of it’s on my iPod.
Audience (Day 47/365)
Guilford College went to a great deal of trouble planning interesting things for families to do this weekend. We ended up doing none of them. We almost got a few bites at the President’s Luncheon, but then the child called just as we sat down to tell us his rugby game had been canceled and he did want to go get something to eat. Fortunately Kent (the college president, we’re all on first name basis here at this Quaker-affiliated institution) had already finished his speech, so we didn’t have to get up in the middle of it after having just come in late.
They also had some kind of entertainment lined up for the evening, but the child’s Music in Contemporary Society teacher had a stack of comp tickets for the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, so he snagged three for us. And that’s where we went.
So today I didn’t create anything myself, but I got to hear a competent orchestra play Shostakovich’s 1st, which I had never heard live before. Shostakovich is one of my favorite composers, his 100th birthday is next Saturday, and hearing his first symphony gave me a chance to listen and think about orchestration. And try not to think too much that he wrote it when he was 19.
Did I learn anything about orchestration? I think so. I think I need to remain aware that small ensembles within the orchestra can carry pretty heavy loads, that it’s preferable to tickle the audience with smaller sounds most of the time. Of course, with William Blake, that’s probably goes without saying, since it’s a small orchestra to begin with, but it’s something I need to keep in mind if/when I begin on my own first symphony.
Mostly nothing (Day 46/365)
Fear and loathing: a rant (Day 45/365)
Yes, Mr. Bush, I am still afraid.
Your recent drumbeat of fear, cynically designed to portray you as the manly protector of our nation, has raised fears in me, to be sure, but not the ones you were hoping for.
Terrorists? Yes, they’re out there, yes, they want to hurt me, no, I am not afraid of them. I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of.
Done (Day 44/365)
I’m finished.
After twenty years of working on it, I have finished the main composition of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. At 8:40 pm, tonight, I wrote the last notes of “10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” the piece which I have avoided for nineteen years and which I finally blundered my way through.
I still have some tweaking to one or two parts of “Milky Way,” I probably still have to write a prologue and an epilogue, I still have to orchestrate the whole thing, and I probably have to rewrite nearly every other piece in the whole work, but I have done it.
I think I’ve been successful with “Milky Way.” It’s complex, it’s structured, it sounds like walking through stars, it has wry humor, it has joy. Can’t wait to hear it orchestrated.
For those who care, here is a PDF of the piano/vocal score, and here is a link to an mp3 of the score. Try to imagine it with a small orchestra. Harp included.
Desktop organization (Day 43/365)
I actually did something creative today.
Yesterday, while surfing a couple of my new favorite productivity/creativity sites, I came across this: http://flickr.com/photos/gr/182329376/in/set-72157594188036656/
The implications are enormous, if you, like me, scatter icons across your desktop and occasionally lose track of what you need to do with them. Here was a pretty intuitive way to keep them all organized.
Typefaces and today (Day 42/365)
I love typefaces. I love typefaces. I get an email from this company, and I go all quivery with type-lust. I want to fire up InDesign and make a big poster just to use the font.
Screw Times Roman and Helvetica, and don’t even talk to me about Arial or Comic Sans. Bleagh.
Give me Cyan 
…
or P22 Cezanne 
…
or High Society 
…
or Young Finesse 
…
or Leaf 
or…
You get the picture. When I was in high school, my girl friend actually gave me an ITC catalog for my birthday. It’s that bad.
So it was with great anticipation that for Christmas last year I gave myself a daily calligraphy calendar. Its premise was that every weekend it would give you a new typeface, and then the week would be spent lettering words that were grouped thematically. What fun, eh wot?
I should have been tipped off when the description on the back of the box simpered, “See if you can guess the theme for the week!” The typefaces were not very exciting, some of them required a brush and ink, not the kind of thing one wants to deal with in the bathroom first thing every morning, and some of them contained egregious errors, e.g., their attempt at an uncial font had a majuscule A and H rather than minuscule. (And you thought I couldn’t get worse.)
Not only that, but after six weeks, the typefaces repeated! What a rip-off! So I lost interest mid-February and have only desultorily pulled the looseleaf pages since then.
I was mildly curious this weekend, gazing on the umpteenth repeat of a swash style, as to what the theme would be this week, especially for today, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And it was therefore with slackjawed stupefaction this morning that I pulled the weekend’s page and saw today’s word: Airplane.
I am not easily shocked, as most of you know, but that was a weird way to begin the morning. The rest of the week had words like propeller, pilot, that kind of thing, but damn, people, did no one think? I would hate to be their email editor this morning.
I may have to go buy ArDeco 
or Chato Band 
just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
Another site (Day 41/365)
Go here:
http://blueskystudio.typepad.com/blueskystudio/2006/08/remember_this.html
Take a side trip to the “this” link. Then come back and work your way back through the little series of his non-brush exploration. Very cool.
In many ways I’m jealous of all these artists who are doing the “thing-a-day” thing, because they can scan/photo their results and post them, and then they have pretty colors in their blog. Even if I get something done, it’s all incomprehensible black-and-white marks.
Oh well, I’m off to work , and hopefully finish, sketching out the rest of “Milky Way.” With any luck, we’ll have more incomprehensible black-and-white marks to look at today.
Noon: So close, so close, so close!! I got the rat grumbling, and I have the final stanza sketched out, but the counter-rhythms are all messed up. I want it to be more open, more relaxed than the nervous little figures at the beginning of the journey, but I can’t make them fit. And I’m hungry, so I’m outta here.
5:15ish: Well, after a nice lunch and a visit to Anne Powell for her birthday, that didn’t take long at all to fix. It wasn’t necessarily the rhythms, but the key. It’s all done but the sweeping coda. This is a very strange feeling, to know that by the end of Tuesday night, I’ll be finished with the main composition of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. (Marc would want to know that I just typed End instead of Inn.)
Notebooks! (Day 40/365)
I traveled to Flowery Branch High School this morning, very early this morning, to teach James Wagoner’s cast of Pride & Prejudice some country dances and the waltz. Great fun, although it made for a tiring day. I haven’t had time today to create a thing myself, just passed along some knowledge.
But I did come across a couple of websites that I really like and want to share. They’re both about using notebooks as repositories for organization and creativity.
They are Moleskinerie and Notebookism. Classy names, eh wot?