Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

A rant

Posted on by Dale

If you do not follow the antics of our right wing, as I tend to do—like watching the carcass of a wild animal day by day on the side of the road—you may be unaware of the Michigan legislature’s “Matt’s Safe School Law,” which was named after a young gay man who committed suicide after being bullied.

What’s so rotten about that, you might ask?  Michigan State Senate Republicans amended the bill to include an exception for “deeply held religious beliefs.”

Think about that for a moment.

That’s right: if the bill passes with that amendment, it will be illegal to bully a kid in school—unless Jesus told you to.

Here’s what Sen. Gretchen Whitmer had to say to her colleagues:

“Your exceptions have swallowed the rule.”  Don’t you like that?

Of course, the strict wording of the amendment just means that it’s OK for someone to say, “I believe being homosexual is against God’s will.”  Only that’s not what those people say, is it?  Simple “declarations of faith” are not exactly what is being licensed here, is it?

Here’s the thing: the Republican neanderthals who came up with this clearly meant for it to protect those little Christianists amongst themselves who think it’s an infringement on their freedom to worship as they please if they can’t kick the crap out of a gay kid.  Sen. Whitmer’s emotional castigation would not even register with those people, because of course it’s OK to leave that queer a bloody pulp on the playground.  Leviticus tells us so.

As usual, of course, they haven’t thought this through.  When the Muslim kid punches out the little Christianist for drawing a sassy cartoon of Mohammad, would they be OK with that? We know what these Republicans would say about Muslims who riot over depictions of the Prophet in newspapers, but their amendment protects exactly this kind of behavior.

“But that’s different!” they would cry if confronted with the idea.

No.  No, it’s not.

Retreat, Day 2

Posted on by Dale

12:30 pm: I slept later than I would have wished, but have been productive nonetheless.

I’m slogging away at transferring the vocals, piano, and strings to the Ayr template.  Sometimes this is a piece of cake, others not so much.  It will amuse those who know the piece that “10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” took forever.  Not only are there thousands of time signature changes, but there are embedded, invisible key changes from  C major to A minor.  If you paste in material that switches from C maj. to A min., the new piece will transpose the differences.  Not a problem: you can insert the invisible key change and tell it to transpose, and all is back to normal.  But still.

When I got to “Marmalade Man Makes a Dance To Mend Us,” I went ahead and orchestrated the whole thing, since the whole thing was flute/recorder/clarinet/bassoon, and pizzicato cello and bass.  This is the exception  however: in the “big three,” the amount of divisi I had in the strings is disheartening.  I’ll have to find a way to cover/redistribute that sound.

All of that’s in the future—O lucky me!—and I should be done by Vespers.

Oh yes, we’re having Vespers.

At the moment, however, I’m in the middle of a hot tub break.  I popped out to make a note in Ego & the Dynamic Ground on some thoughts I had in meditation.

2:45 pm: I’m done with William Blake’s Inn, at least the easy part.  I’m now going to set that aside and play in the couple hours I have remaining to me.

I could start reconstructing A Christmas Carol, but that would be boring.  There’s also Simon’s Dad, but that’s too major.  So I think I’m going to play around with some more piano pieces, tentatively called Five Easier Pieces, because I at least plan for them to be easier than the Six Fugues.

Retreat 2011

Posted on by Dale

It is probably unfortunate that the cabin we’re staying in for this year’s Lichtenbergian Retreat has wifi.

Still, it allows me to live blog, kind of, my work—and that’s a time-honored Lichtenbergian principle.  Nay, it is the very foundation of Lichtenbergianism, doing something semi-valid in order to avoid the actual work.

9:33 am: I’ve been working for about an hour, poking into the nooks and crannies of Finale 2012. It seems that I buy a new version of Finale every time I have a major thing to work on, which always slows me down while I figure out where Finale hid everything this time.  If I were a working composer, I’d go nuts having to relearn all the menus and stuff.  For example, up until now you changed the name of a staff in the staff dialog box.  But now that’s in the new Score Management window.  Feh.

At any rate, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to set up a template for the reorchestration of William Blake’s Inn, which is my major task this weekend.  I think I’ve got it: children, SATB, piano, synth I, synth II, and string quintet.  The synths are actually made up of independent staves, since one of the new tricks Finale can do (just in time for this orchestration) is to change instruments midstream, but if you have a “piano” staff, your only choices are other double-staffed instruments like the harp.  If you have two independent staves grouped as “Synth I,” then your choices open up to all the other instruments.

So yes, the world premiere of William Blake’s Inn, if it happens now, will be with a reduced orchestra.

Why, you ask?  Not to get anybody’s hopes up, but William Blake’s Inn is being considered as the performance we will send to our sister city, Ayr, Scotland.  Next June.

So there’s that.  Yeah.

Two things have become painfully apparent to me: I should have brought a score to look at, and I should have brought my Cinema Display.  The size of the laptop screen is not conducive to zipping through a full orchestral score looking for the part you’re hoping to duplicate.  Oh well.

A score would have been helpful in quickly finding where time/key signature changes happen: I can copy and paste the parts from the original to the new template, but all those changes do not come with them.  With a piece like “Milky Way,” that’s a pain.  Not that I’m going to work on “Milky Way” this weekend.  Stick to the simple ones: “Wise Cow,” “Dance,” “Fire,” that kind of thing.

And actually, just stick to porting over the voices and the strings.  Even the piano parts can wait for the most part.  If I just get the voices/strings laid out in a couple of pieces, then I can start arranging the children’s chorus part, because to be brutally honest, this was never conceived as a piece for children to perform.

More later.

3:38 pm:  It’s almost hot tub time.  Since this morning, I’ve gotten seven of the fifteen pieces transferred into the new template, which seems kind of slow, but some of these are horrors of multiple time signatures.  I have to set up the new blank piece with all the time signatures and key changes ahead of copying and pasting the originals in, or it all goes whacky and it’s easier to start over from scratch.

I have been copying and pasting the piano part as well as the vocals and the strings.  I’ve standardized the solo lines, giving them a separate staff above the chorus, whereas before I think I was saving paper by having solos embedded in the chorus staves.

Above all, I’ve been resisting doing any other work, although with “Rabbit Reveals My Room” and “King of Cats Orders an Early Breakfast,” I did stick in some of Synth I’s stuff, because without it there wouldn’t be much accompaniment to go on.

Big question right now: time to do one more, or hit the hot tub?

New drink

Posted on by Dale

The Pomander

  • 1-1/2 oz. cinnamon whiskey (in this case, Fireball–thanks Marc!)
  • 1 oz. Cointreau
  • 1 thick wedge of lime
  • cloves

Squeeze the lime wedge into a martini glass and dust with cloves.   Shake the liquors with ice, strain.

It has occurred to us, the lovely first wife and myself, that for the holidays one could stud the lime wedge with an actual clove, á la an actual pomander.

It has a lovely taste, vivid, not overly sweet.  The lime juice keeps it complex.

Cello Sonata No. 1, III. Andante (Elegy)

Posted on by Dale

Okay, I think I’m done.  Notice that I did not say I think the piece is finished.

I am particularly concerned that mm. 51-56 are suspect.  I am willing to throw them out and write something more stringent.  I await your comments.

Cello Sonata No. 1 (2011)

I. Moderato | score [pdf] | mp3

II. Adagio | score [pdf] | mp3

III. Andante (Elegy) | score [pdf] | mp3

Cello sonata, mvt 3, take 8

Posted on by Dale

I’m quite pleased with some of the way it’s going at the end of today’s work, but as always I’m flummoxed by my lack of theoretical knowledge.  You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find the harmony for one measure, and I’m still not sure of it.

Where it tapers off is where I stopped for today and headed outside to bask in the labyrinth. Again, there’s a gap, then what I intend to be the ending.  I’m sure you’re wondering how I’m going to connect it to what’s there now.  I am, also.

III. Andante (Elegy): mp3

Cello sonata, mvt 3, take 7

Posted on by Dale

I actually made real progress last night, although it’s no longer than it was before.  I decided to do the old pull-back-then-build-higher trick, so I sliced off what I wrote last week after the run up to the high B-flat and brought it way down.  Now it’s taken a turn for the purely tonal, which is fine.  Sounds more relaxed, though it’s not really.  I also decided to give the pianist’s left hand a rest for a few measures…

III. Andante (Elegy): mp3

My plan is to forge ahead this week and this weekend and try to have the whole thing done by the end of this month.  Because I actually have other projects facing me.

One of which is not, alas, Christmas Carol.  Paul Conroy, in a pinch over their Christmas Carol this year, called as I was pulling out of the airport parking lot Sunday night: would I allow them to produce my old script/score?  Of course, I said, providing I have the time to reinvent the sound files.

The problem was that all the files were old midi files, unplayable on any software I now own.  I would have to 1) find them; 2) convert them into Finale files; 3) clean them up (many of them were actually played in by my unreliable fingers, so they get converted with all kinds of thirty-second note lead-ins and general messiness); 4) reorchestrate many of them to fit the new instrumentations available to me; 5) learn how to export them to some sequencer so that all those vamps in the Graveyard Scene and the Finale can work—all before rehearsals have to start.

Alas, I failed at step one.  I cannot find the files.  I know I had them on the last two computers I owned, so why they’re not on this one, I have no idea.  This means that I would have to build everything completely from the original score, which is an appalling mess.  The overture was never written down; it went straight into the sequencer.  I futzed with many of the pieces in the computer and never printed them out.  I would be hard pressed to get this done by next November.

Still, I began to run through the music in my head, and you know what?  It’s still good.  Hardly anything else I wrote from 30 years ago still stands up, but Christmas Carol does.  For those of you who remember it, think of: “A Reason for Laughter,” “Cratchit’s Prayer” (aka “The Gag a Maggot Song”), “20 Questions” (with lyrics by Marc Honea), “Ignorance and Want,” “People Like Us”, and the Finale.  ::sigh:: Good times.

Maybe next year, as we say in Sondheim.

Cello sonata, third mvt, take… let’s call it 6.

Posted on by Dale

I know, it’s been forever. I’ve been busy. And afraid. I’ve been busy and afraid. I decided a while ago what I wanted to do to this last movement, and now I’m at the point where I have to by god do it. Very very scary.

Anyway, I worked tonight. I had already lopped off the pastoral interlude bit, and recently added the three measures of the ending. Now I had to start hammering out where it went from where I lopped it off.

It’s off to a good start, I think, although it’s not elegant. And where it peters out is awful. I’ve left it for the moment, so enjoy its awfulness while you can. It won’t be here when you get back. Maybe.

If you choose to listen to it now, be advised that when it cuts off, there are two measures of rest, and then the ending as it stands now. See what you think.

III. Andante (Elegy): mp3

A new song cycle

Posted on by Dale

I had an evil idea tonight in Masterworks Chorale rehearsal.

The men were singing a Stephen Foster song, “Gentle Annie,” and I was struck by the excessively maudlin nature of the lyrics. They were revolting. “Thou shalt come no more, Gentle Annie,” etc. Also too.

The whole thing reminded me of Emmiline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn and her odious “Ode to Stephen Dowling Botts, Dec’d,” which I will now quote in full:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC’D

And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
‘Twas not from sickness’ shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

Well, you asked for it by coming to this blog.

Anyway, I made a mental note to find this poem and print it out. I made an actual note in my iPhone: Huckleberrry death poetry. And that’s when it hit me. Wouldn’t that be an awesome title for a short song cycle? Huckleberry Death Songs.

Emmeline Grangerford died too young to leave behind more than the one ode, alas (and yes, that was an allusion and a joke.) But fortunately, the woman Twain was parodying has left behind several volumes of the stuff. See for yourself. And there’s tons more: Julia Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan.

Would this not be wickedly awesome? Some warped kind of Stephen Foster choral fest… Hm…

That concert, by the way, is October 23. It’s a Civil War Sesquicentennial thing, chock full of the usual suspects. Should be at least fun to listen to.

A world premiere

Posted on by Dale

Score one for me. Last Thursday, in Valdosta State’s Whitehead Auditorium, Maila Springfield and her husband David had their faculty recital. On the program: “Six Preludes (no fugues),” written last summer expressly for Maila.

Maila Gutierrez Springfield was the staff accompanist for many years at GHP, and she is a goddess. Warm and supportive personally, she is a phenomenal pianist. I was in the chorus room for one large rehearsal when she inexplicably hit a wrong note—the whole room gasped and we had to stop. That Maila could ever play a wrong note was simply unthinkable.

Several summers ago she asked me to write something for her, David (jazz trombonist), and their friend Joren Cain (saxophonist) to play when they toured. Needless to say, I have not wrapped my head around that combination yet. But I kept her in mind, and in June of 2010 something made me start writing. I blogged about it after the fact, so I don’t have a post exclaiming, “I know! I’ll write some preludes!” but I suspect it was having been at GHP to help Marcie get started in the role of assistant program director for instruction and being with Maila at some point that week.

Here’s a pretty irony: last Thursday, I was engaged in tidying up my office, i.e., exploring notebooks that I had moved from my old cubicle to my new one and determining whether I needed to keep them (mostly not: manuals for software no one has owned for ten years, that kind of thing), and I came across a Georgia Music Educators magazine from 2002. (My predecessor, Joe Searle, was a musician.) I flipped idly through it, thinking maybe Joe kept it because he was in it, but I didn’t see any reference to him or to GHP.

However, I did see two things. Follow this chain carefully: Maila asked me to write for her after hearing Stephen Czarkowski (of cello sonata fame) butcher a reading of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” with the orchestra; “Milky Way” is sitting now on the desk of Dr. Tim Seelig, waiting for him to have time to look over it (and then, nice man that he is, trying to figure out how to tell me that it’s not to his taste); Tim Seelig was the director of the Turtle Creek Chorale in Dallas; and there, as the highlight of the upcoming GMEA convention, was the Turtle Creek Chorale and a fabulous headshot of Dr. Seelig. Cool!

But in the back of the magazine, under University News, there was the announcement that Maila Gutierrez Springfield had been hired by VSU as staff accompanist and piano instructor. This was Thursday morning. That evening, Maila premiered “Six Preludes.” ::cue Twilight Zone theme::

So how did it go, this world premiere? I haven’t heard the performance yet—Maila had hoped the University would select her recital for web streaming—but they didn’t, but she reported Friday morning that the piece was the audience favorite. Many were astonished that I was a composer—I am such a shy, retiring bastard—and expressed an interest in hearing more of my music. Whether she’s just telling me that to make me feel good or whether it’s a wonderfully true fact, I appreciate the sentiment.

I’ve asked Maila to send me a CD or a DVD of the concert. I’ll let you know when I get it.

Now, on to the cello sonata!