I was buying some Post-It™ tabs for my new Moleskine GTD notebook yesterday, and I came across inkjet bumper sticker sheets.
Well.
I gave the music a break tonight and did this instead:
Coming soon to a bumper near you.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
Next… (Day 51/365)
And now… “Blake’s Wonderful Car Delivers Us Wonderfully Well” in score and mp3.
I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limits of what Finale can do in terms of aping a real orchestra. But better solutions are both expensive (like Finale is not??) and time-consuming. This will have to do till we get into rehearsal.
Finally, some work around here (Day 50/365)
Ha! Just because I’ve goofed off for a couple of days, albeit in Greensboro, NC, doesn’t mean I’m worthless.
Here for your perusal is the piano score for “William Blake’s Inn for Innocent and Experienced Travelers” and an mp3 of the piece orchestrated.
Double-ha.
Masterworks (Day 49/365)
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.