Creating something every day for 365 days
Well, I cleaned off my drafting table, bought a USB extension cable, moved my keyboard over to the table, got out my manuscript paper, and got to work.
My project, you may recall, was to tackle the faulty climax to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” the tenth and central piece to A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. I transcribed the first measure of the Tiger’s “I shall garland my room” passage and started there.
Tonight was the first night back at Masterworks. We have a heavy Christmas program, a couple of smaller gigs, and a concert in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on March 10.
It was good to be singing again. All we did was sightread, but even that was challenging and fun. The music selection for the November concert is varied and interesting, from Praetorius through Handel up to Britten and Berlin. Nice stuff.
Huge chorus this year! The bass section covered half the back row, and baritones and tenors were not far behind.
It might be nice to write for a chorus like that, but I think I’ll spend my energies on pieces that won’t be performed by imaginary groups rather than ignored by one I’m a member of.
I almost did nothing. I cleaned up my work area, clearing the drafting table to serve as my “away from the computer” composition area. I read more of my CSS book.
In other news, I have a couple of uses for my lottery winnings:
Sorry, it was one of those days. I did nothing. I can’t even claim to have cleaned up my study and cleaned off my drafting table in preparation for composing away from the computer. I just read.
I read my book on Leibniz and Spinoza. I think I’m siding with Spinoza at this point. I read Louis Sachar’s sequel to Holes, called Small Steps. Any goodwill invested in our main character Armpit from Holes is diluted by a made-for-Disney plot; it was a good book, but not very believable and certainly not as good as Holes. I read my new book on CSS and how to design websites with it, which is one of my goals for the fall.
But otherwise, nothing. Nada. Zip.
So we’re down to eight planets.
In a cosmic game of Ten Little Indians, the International Astronomical Union has voted that to be called a planet, an object must be in orbit around a star, be big enough for its gravity to collapse itself into a round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
This vote on a topic contentious for the past year eliminates Ceres (an asteroid), and Xena (out in the Kuiper Belt) from the competition. It also knocks Pluto completely off the nation’s placemats. They are now lumped together under the new rubric dwarf planet. At least they escaped demotion to small solar system bodies.
Ah, well. C’est la astronomie.
I’ve decided I’ve got to do more work away from the computer. I’m not so much composing, in the sense of hearing music and creating the notation for that on paper, a.k.a. “writing it down”, as I am playing with dots on a computer monitor and listening to the results. It’s almost dada-istic as an approach, and I don’t think I like it any more.
A couple of things tonight, and these are really randomly written:
I played with the interlude leading up to the climax of “Milky Way” and have been having some success with messing with the rhythm. I also began forcing myself to think in terms of eventual orchestral sounds, contrasts in volume, etc. It had dawned on me on one of my walks that the big climax (the narrator’s “I shall never part day from night”) could very well be an enormous climax and I could pull out all the stops, big brass maybe and augmentation of the theme, motives, etc. Nothing like a rolling tympani to get these things going, of course.
I also, in my string quartet file entitled “abortive sketches”, began playing with polytonality. This is really where I wish I had gotten a degree in composition. Somebody could have taught me this, and no matter how painful it would have been to learn all this crap, it would have been less painful than trying to discover it on my own.
At any rate, a handful of measures of that was astonishingly effective. Is this all it takes to sound serious, the accompaniment in C and the melody in A? I remember being intrigued by Sondheim’s use of polytonality in Into the Woods, how any of us got our notes, I’ll never know. But then he’s a master.
And now, looking over that score, I have to think about whether I need to totally revisit “Milky Way” to explore a more astringent sound. Do I want a scarier walk? Or should it be lush and tonal? The beginning is already dissonant within reason. I always lose sight of that, though, as I keep working and having fun with pure triads.
I know, I’ll just go back and insert some seconds.
So tonight I just farted around with music. I opened up a string quartet document, threw in some whole notes, played with chord progressions, and limited myself to eight measures. I played with crescendos, with articulations, and then moved on.
I changed tempo, key, and time signature. I threw in the main theme from the symphony and played with that as a string quartet theme, adding a lilting viola accompaniment.
Most of it sucked, and I’m leaving it where it lies. Next!
So this was different: Benjie sends me email, urging me to enter the My Dream App contest, and so I did.
The concept is simple: you describe your dream application, something you’d love to have on your Macintosh OS X computer, and submit it. A team of judges will narrow the field to 24 apps, and then a couple of weeks of blogging and refining, etc., goes on, and then The People vote on the top three. Then the sponsors of the contest actually develop those three pieces of software.
Winners get MacBook Pro laptops and some other stuff (I wasn’t paying attention), plus 15% royalties on the new software. Pretty cool.
Continue reading “A different kind of creativity (Day 21/365)”
I went for one of my walks this morning and sketched out an interesting B theme for the symphony, so I was going to post about that, I really was, but then the Times splashed all over its SundayStyles section a story I absolutely could not not write about. Kevin, cover your ears.
Above the fold is a huge photograph of a happy family, a happy toddler being tickled by the handsome dad, the warm-looking mother smiling into the camera on the sidelines. The headline is The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack, and the feature is about transgendered men: women who surgically become men. The dad, Shane, used to be Sharon.
Continue reading “Head-spinningly complicated lives: a post (Day 20/365)”