Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Lichtenbergian goals, 2014

Posted on by Dale

Each year the members of the Lichtenbergian Society have their Annual Meeting around the fire in the Labyrinth, and part of our ritual—which involves much toasting to all the things—is setting our creative goals for the coming year and evaluating the goals we set for this past year.

All in all, I didn’t do too badly with 2014’s goals.  Of course, with my permanent retirement, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have done more, but hey, it’s Lichtenbergianism.

Five Easier Pieces

Didn’t get to them.  I don’t think I even took a stab at them.  I certainly don’t have them.

song for John Tibbetts

This one I did.  It’s entitled “Your Beauty,” and can be found here.  I don’t know whether it actually works; the key to its effectiveness (if any) is in the live interpretation, and the computer doesn’t come close to being able to do that.   But I think it’s solid enough.

SUN TRUE FIRE

See, here’s the thing with SUN TRUE FIRE.  I was going to spend all of 2014 noodling with the text and experimenting with snippets by taking bits of other people’s music and seeing if I could replicate the effects that I admired: orchestration or harmony or counterpoint, etc.  I kind of started, but then Seven Dreams of Falling came my way.  As a Lichtenbergian, I was honor bound to postpone one work by creating another.  SUN TRUE FIRE isn’t dead; it is sleeping.

Waste books

Another success story.  I have used the Field Notes notebooks for every project, including morning pages (at which I have not been assiduous) and actual waste books (at which I have been slightly better).  Some, like the notebooks on Christmas Carol or “Your Beauty,” have only a few pages in them.  But I filled three notebooks with thoughts and designs and instructions and references for Burning Man, and as we keep 3 Old Men moving forward I expect to fill  more.  I love my notebooks.

Burning Man

Here’s the thing about Burning Man.  I planned for it, I got tickets for it, my application to be a theme camp was accepted, it was golden—and then we couldn’t go.  Undeterred, we pushed on to Alchemy and it was amazing.  Because we were so successful there, and because we intend to keep the band together for future regional burns, I’m counting this one as my most successful goal of the year.

Christmas Carol

The goal was to reconstruct the music for A Christmas Carol for Newnan Theatre Company’s revival of the show, the first in eleven years.  I did that.  I delivered a complete set of scores and parts, plus the script, back in August.  Due to the exigencies of community theatre, the production didn’t quite get the music back on its feet, but I got the job done.  We’ll see about next year.

Next up: 2015 goals!

Herodotus

Posted on by Dale

So last night, I was reading a little Herodotus in bed—as one does—…

No, really, Herodotus is a hoot.  We’re still reading him 2,500 years later because he’s such a gossip.  He reminds me of T. R. Pearson and of Lawrence Sterne in that he is absolutely unable to resist a detour into whatever name/event/detail comes up in his narrative.  (Yes, I know that all three writers are doing it deliberately.)

The edition I’m reading is The Landmark Herodotus, edited by Robert Strassler and translated by Andrea Purvis.  It’s a beautiful book qua book, with copious footnotes, sidenotes, maps, illustrations, and a stream of info across the top of each page alerting you to where we are geographically and narratively.  There’s a timeline/outline up front, and a flock of appendices (22!) about various topics in Herodotous’s world.

Of course, none of this helps me to keep it all in my head.  If there were ever an example of not having the context necessary for understanding, this charming 700-page story of Middle Eastern politics and mores would be it.  But I plug away, enjoying the author’s wit and style and keeping up enough to keep going.

Why do I bring this up?  It has occurred to me that perhaps Herodotus—and this edition in particular—is the key to the structure of my putative A Perfect Life, the oversize blank book I bought six years ago (!) with the idea that I would fill it with a discursive memoir of what it’s been like to live my life, i.e., that of a more-upper-than-not middle class, educated white male in an undisturbed small town in the late-20th/early-21st century United States.  I should expect to wander from topic to topic, following the flow of thought that comes from realizing that the reader needs background on something I’ve just mentioned.  (Remember that this whole project sprang from my childhood curiosity about the details of private life in the past.)

Which is not to say that I think I should whip out the pen and ink and just start scribbling.  It’s probably vital that I give some thought to some kind of structure, e.g., what is it I want to be discursive about?  Do I want to get polemical?  Should I write as if I thought the book itself might be discovered in the rubble after the apocalypse, or am I writing for actual publication?  Do I want to explain what the “United States” “used to be,” or “electricity,” or do I presume the future reader still knows these things?

I think I need a Retreat to think about this seriously.

Ambition

Posted on by Dale

You may recall that one of my Lichtenbergian goals this year was to institute a system of “waste books,” i.e., notebooks that would serve as repositories of random stuff that could later be transferred to wherever they needed to go, e.g., blogpost, letter, other notebook.

You may also recall that I subscribed to the Field Notes “Colors” notebooks, which has been really cool since every quarter I get a new set of notebooks, each a new geek-o-rific design. It’s actually a creative impetus each time, since one tends to think, “Ah, a set of notebooks with a cherry (wood!) veneer cover! I shall use those to journal my Burner experiences!” And so forth.

I’ve had a great year with my Field Notes: planning 3 Old Men for Burning Man/Alchemy; morning pages; waste books; keeping my re-orchestration of Christmas Carol on track; text and notes for John Tibbetts’ song; prepping for SUN TRUE FIRE, which was sidetracked by Seven Dreams of Falling, which has its own notebook. I planned my son’s wedding ceremony in the Arts notebook, and started a labyrinth design project in the Sciences notebook. It’s been fun.

However, I am distressed at the most recent offering, their 25th release. Each release has a name—Shelterwood, Arts & Sciences, Unexposed—and they’ve named this one Ambition. It’s stunning, beautiful, and absolutely daunting.

Love the colors. Love the gilded edges you guys! Love the gold staples.

But then you open them.

AMBITION. You see what they’re about. From left to right, we have a 56-week date book, a ledger book, and a memo book.

This is serious stuff. Planning. Budgeting. Making something happen. Something big. Something important. Something consequential. They didn’t gild those edges for your paltry, quotidian concerns.

What am I supposed to do with these?? They mock me. They’re going into the archival wooden box where I will not have to look at them. I will be able to sleep at night. All will be well.

Classic Lichtenbergianism

Posted on by Dale

So I have two options this morning: pound out another 3 Old Men post, or implement an idea I stole from another composer to solve the “reboot” problem in the fourth movement of Symphony No. 1.

If you guessed “None of them, Katie,” you are our daily winner!

The timer went off on my phone, which meant I had to go downstairs, remove the sheets from the dryer, and get them on the guest bed so they “won’t be wrinkled.”

::beat::

Anyway, as I was preparing to finish getting the top sheet on, I was struck by the morning light.

Bedscapes

1

2

3

4

5

So there’s that hour gone.

I suppose I should head back over to the Symphony now…

Today in crapping out music

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I know it’s Thanksgiving, but I woke up from dreaming about a) men getting tattoos, and b) the symphony.

Leaving aside the tattooed men for the moment—oh, GROW UP YOU PEOPLE—I decided to slip upstairs while I could and crap out some notes.  I had gotten the fourth movement nicely started, and then it nicely ground to a silence, which was my intent.  The problem with grinding to a silence is that then one must start back up.  That’s where the dilemma is, and that’s what I woke up dreaming.  If I had actually dreamed a solution, that would have been fantastic, but I didn’t.  I just awoke to the need to do something about it.

For the moment, I’ve been falling back on my “abortive attempts” strategy: putting in a double bar (to mark my place) and just plopping out new sounds to see if I can trigger something that works.  I’ve also been going back into the file of the original fourth movement and stealing stuff I liked from there to see if it will fit in with the new stuff.  Which it should, because as I said previously I’m not starting from scratch, just rewriting what I’ve already done.  So far, it’s a good stopgap measure: the old work is not bad stuff, and it may get me started when I’m actually able to sit down and work all day on it.

You will have noticed that I have not shared any of this.

So, tattooed men.

Let’s see if I can find a nice, pretty, safe-for-work image of what was running through my head last night…

That’s kind of it, although I recall the tattoos as being more geometric than tribal, just big blocks of black.  We were at some kind of social gathering, and all the men had these tattoos on their arms.  (Click on the image to see the whole page of some very nice tattoos.  And then click on this link to see some absolutely beautiful tattoos!)

Other than my long-term fascination with tattoos, I don’t have any explanation for the dream.  The whole concept of marking oneself appeals to me, and it would be disingenuous of me not to recognize that part of the appeal lies in what I take to be an inherent masculinity in the concept.  (Certainly the young men on the tribal page are healthy exemplars of manly manliness.)

However, I’ve always shied away from the idea of large tattoos on my own personal body.  The two I have are small and discreet.  If you didn’t know I had them, you’d never know.  I think it’s because I have no confidence in my ability to carry it off, masculinity-speaking-wise.  I don’t have the broad chest or shapely biceps that the specimens you see on the internet have, and I never did.  One doesn’t want to look ludicrous, after all.

I’ve been forbidden to get more tattoos because some of us don’t find them appealing so it’s kind of a moot point to think about the topic, but there are at least three that I would get if I could.

The first is my lovely first wife’s signature.  You’d think that one would be appealing, but no.  I’ve informed her that if she dies, I’m showing up at the funeral with her name tattooed on me and everyone will think it’s sweet.  Probably I’d want that one on the inside of my wrist.  (FYI, I have a sheet with her signature already filed away.)

The second is a lizard.  I hesitate to use the term “spirit animal” out in public, but it’s an animal that has recurred in my meditations and in my art collecting, and one day I realized that I have half a dozen of the critters sitting around my study and the labyrinth.  It must mean something.  I don’t have a design picked out, and I’m not sure where I’d put it.  Maybe as I continue to evolve into an Old Man, I’ll get a rather large one on my chest.  Break down that particular barrier. (For a very interesting explication of what tattoos can mean, I highly recommend Seven Tattoos by Peter Trachtenberg.)

The third one is the Lichtenbergian motto, Cras melior est, which translates as “Tomorrow is better.”  This is my friend Kevin’s idea for his tattoo, and I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me previously.  Upper arm, perhaps, or my shoulder blade?  As I said, it’s a moot point, so I don’t spend a lot of time pondering the issue.

There may be others.  I seem to recall wanting four, but nothing is bubbling to the surface at the moment.  The important thing for me is that none of them are decoration.  The tattoos on the two pages to which I’ve linked are beautiful, but many of them seem to be sheerly decorative, “tribal” in the sense of “trendy/in-crowd.”  That’s not what I’m after.

I think that the best word to describe what I hope for in getting a tattoo is incorporation.  (I will now pause to let Marc shiver with a frisson of sinthome or whatever it is he shivers with.)  The marks I want on my body—permanently—are markers: some thing, some idea, some force that I want embodied on my body and in my living.  I crave the commitment.

Hm.  I did not plan to write about tattoos this morning.   Wonder what that’s about?

And another thing!

Posted on by Dale

For the past month I’ve been re-reading this blog, which is almost ten years old.  Due to one upgrade to WordPress or another, older posts have been displaying some weird and disturbing characteristics.  All oddball “special characters,” like anything umlauted or accented, got converted into some universal code.  I’ve let them go.

But the conversion of em-dashes, i.e., “—”, into space-comma-space cannot stand.  It makes me look like an illiterate purveyor of comma-spliced sentences.

So now I have to take the time (I’m in 2010) to open each post and find and replace all those instances of space-comma-space.  Ugh.  Two more and I will program a macro to do it all.

later:

Or I could do this.  I could, you know.  I think.  Or you might never see this blog again…

Problems

Posted on by Dale

Do you know what is FUN?

Finally getting your brain in gear to compose again after at least a month of not being able to, and TECHNICAL ISSUES TAKE UP ALL MORNING.  That’s what is not fun.

Short version: I have keyboard controller, i.e., it doesn’t make sound on its own, which plugs into the computer via a USB cable.  I use it to a) input notes into Finale (itself a charming bundle of issues); and b) noodle around on a small software synth.

So when it stopped working recently, I was nonplussed.  It would play for four or five seconds, then stop sending MIDI data to the synth/Finale altogether.  Restarting it or rescanning the MIDI would fix it, but only for another four or five seconds.

I’m trying to get better about composing with the keyboard rather than just plopping notes on the screen, and this issue was not helping my efforts.

I have replaced the USB cable, reset the MIDI setup, etc. etc. etc.  It took me an hour and a half via Google just now to try and discard three different solutions, and then finally stumbled across someone in an Apple Support forum who figured out that his USB cable (essentially a power cable) was too long.  The computer wasn’t sending enough power to the keyboard to keep it running.

A shorter cable would fix it, but my set-up doesn’t allow for a shorter cable.  (I mean, I could clean off my desk, I suppose, but that would take a day and a half…)

A powered USB hub—one that plugs in and delivers power on its own— was a suggested solution, and of course I have one from days gone by.  Dug it out, and that may have fixed the problem.  I’ll report back.  Later.  After I’ve composed more than the two measures I squeezed out this morning before being sucked into the Intertubes.

So…

Posted on by Dale

I did an odd thing today.  I pulled out the fourth movement of the Symphony No. 1 in G and started over on it.

Started over.

My original plan this morning was to open the old file and do some Things to it to fix it, the first of which was to expand the note values of the lento section to be more legible: 32nd note triplets in an extremely slow tempo (as in, 12 notes to a single beat) were simply too hard to read. The plan was to use a built-in utility to make each 32nd note into a 16th note and redistribute All The Notes into new measures.

However, since none of the empty measures up and down the orchestra were real rests, those measures didn’t get doubled and redistributed.  Therefore, on playback, nothing was aligned—woodwinds were wandering in and out when they should have been in sync with the strings—and though it might have been “interesting” it was not good.

So I used a utility to make all the empty measures real rests and tried again.  (There was also an issue with the pickup measure not doubling.)

Now everything lined up, but none of the dynamics moved with their notes, i.e., ffs and pps and pizzicatos were way off.

Finally, after giving it a good listen, I decided that everything I’ve done since April 2008—and here I am referring to my entire life, not just my composition—has made it necessary for me to scrap the old stuff and start over.

I’m not starting from scratch. The opening mood and main theme will remain the same, but I’m rewriting it from the ground up.  Literally: the swirling triplets that were in the violins are now in the celli and basses and are actually completely different notes.  There’s a new countertheme that probably will grow in importance, and harmonies are a little different—and likely to become even more different—than before.  It’s an adventure.

What prompted this?

Yesterday my lovely first wife and I went to the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to hear a concert that featured a kinda-premiere of a symphony by Richard Prior, a professor at Emory.  It was competent but not thrilling, and while I don’t think I’m at the same technical level as Dr. Prior, the experience made me think that I should take another look at my own symphony in the belief that it might actually be more interesting.

So there we go.  The suspense is terrible; I hope it will last.

The roar of the chainsaw, the smell of the art

Posted on by Dale

On Saturday we motored over to Gray, GA, for Chaptacular, which — despite what conclusion your filthy mind has already leapt to—is actually an art event hosted by Chap Nelson on his spacious property as a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The full event name is Chaptacular Chainsaw Carving Bash, and it was more than, again, what you were expecting.

About twenty carvers from all over the country—including a national champion and an international champion—were on the premises, hard at work by the time we got there.

A lot of the work (all of which was for sale) was much what you would expect:

Lots and lots of bears: little ones, like these; big ones; happy ones; sad ones; silly ones.  You name it.  But there were other subjects as well:

Stop it, you perverts!  That’s a pelican.  I think.  Lots of Green Men/wood spirits:

Watching these people work was fascinating.  It’s all I can do to cut a log in half with my chainsaw, and here they were wielding them with surgical precision.  Like “real” sculptors, they had a whole set of chainsaws in different sizes, plus buffers and grinders and sanders.

Soon after we arrived, most of the artists assembled for the “quick carve” event.  It’s mindblowing.  About a dozen of them stood in the carving area, each with a large block of wood and his tools, and after a brief intro from Mr. Nelson, they started their chainsaws up and went to work.

http://dalelyles.com/images/chaptacular14_quickcarve.mov

Go ahead, click on it.  It’s only 30 seconds long, and it’s tiny, unfortunately; if you do full-screen, it goes grainy.  Sorry.  But do look carefully at the man on the far right of the video, slightly behind the guy in front.

Here’s a good look at him from the other side, on the left.  For the longest time, all he did was saw straight down through his block.

Hold that thought.  After 20-30 minutes of ungodly noise—it really did become hysterically mind-numbing because nobody stopped, nobody paused even for breath—shapes began to emerge.

As you’re holding that thought about the short guy with the tall block, hold a new one about the young man on the right.

Here’s what the short guy ended up with:

This is the national champion, and he got here way faster than the other artists.  (Unfortunately, for our tastes, he ended up spray-painting the heron.)

Okay, back to the young man:

Ambitious, to say the least, and I don’t think he got it very finished by the time the carve was over.  But it was still amazing to watch.

It wasn’t all bears and green men:

These are inlaid with turquoise and crystals.  Not tremendously balanced, artistically-speaking-wise, but they were different from the surrounding work.

As you might suspect, most of the work was not something I would own, but as a demonstration of the creative process it was amazing.  It was the ultimate “take a block of wood and remove everything that isn’t a heron” experience.

The one piece I almost bought and would have if I still had two incomes:

It  would have gone in the southwest corner of the labyrinth, maybe.  Unless it proved to be too large to fit in, in which case I would have given it to Craig for his labyrinth.  (Who am I kidding?  I would have made it fit.)

Finally, if you’re in the market for a bear, this is the place to be.  They had an auction of pieces donated by the artists, all proceeds of which went to the CFF.  And good deals were to be had thereby.  I highly recommend marking your calendar for next year’s event.

A quick look into the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’ve been “quiet.”

Have a couple of photos of the labyrinth from this afternoon.

The bowl from the west point.  The maple leaves were everywhere; I tried to get a nice shot of the freshly mown labyrinth with a couple of them scattered about, but I needed a real photographer to do that.

Our dancing fawn, aka Dionysus.  Look carefully at his right hand—his thumb has cracked off.  I’m sure I will have to replace him after the snows of winter, but as Shakespeare always reminds us, “Every fair from fair sometime declines.“