Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Cello Sonata No. 1: II. Adagio

Posted on by Dale

I think I may be done with the second movement, Adagio, of the cello sonata. I swore that I was going to get it done this weekend, and I have. At least, I have filled in the gap between what I tinkered with in July and the final four measures. I don’t know what else to do with it.

As I mentioned before, playback is problematic with this piece, since there’s a section where the cello drags behind and the piano maintains a steady beat. If you look at the score, you’ll see copious instructions to the players on now to manage that. The computer, of course, just plays it all as if it’s in perfect alignment.

I know that the asynchronous playing works because I got two students to read through it this summer. They were puzzled, if polite, and I think they thought it was too easy for them to be bothering with. No matter: what I thought I heard in my head actually works, and of course it’s easy, it’s a break for the pianist between the first and third movements, which are pretty relentless.

So here it is:

II. Adagio: score [pdf] | mp3

Now to finish the third movement. Not today, of course. But soon. Soon.

A pretty thing

Posted on by Dale

In adherence to my Lichtenbergian oath (did we ever come up with one of those?), I have been avoiding working on the cello sonata since I got the first third written earlier, and today I decided to look through some of my older music files. I came across the Mass in C.

This is something I don’t think any of you have ever heard. I wrote this probably more than 20 years ago, and I know we had one readthrough at First Baptist one afternoon, and I think I remember that Denise Johnson and Julie Aagesen sang the solos in the piece I’m sharing. Other than that, it’s never been performed.

Nonetheless, I opened some of the files this afternoon and discovered that they still held up. They’re very simple harmonically (I toyed with subtitling it Missa simplex, but that was kind of icky so I stopped), and I may have to revisit the entire work at some point. There are some clumsy bits that I know enough now to fix.

The Benedictus in particular is quite lovely. Score [pdf] | mp3

Enjoy. Disclaimer: the file was sucked up into Finale 2010 from a very old file, and none of the dynamics or tenuti or anything subtle came with the notes. It’s pretty raw. Try to hear it under lights.

(I’m also avoiding the Welcome Christmas Carol Contest deadline, August 8, a setting of some text for men’s chorus and English horn. Someone should write me a text. I’m thinking an elfin kind of piece, sort of playing against the stereotypically lugubrious nature of the instrument. In fact, now that I’m writing this, I remember that I had in mind an idea for a kind of ballad to one’s beloved that involved the Yule. I knew I should have written down those fragments. Garn.)

Blog posts I have not written

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been busy, which doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about blogging. It just means that I have these ideas about blogging, then decide to read other people’s blogs instead. Or work in the labyrinth. Or sort and type in 700 Finalist Application Forms. That kind of thing.

I thought I would list as many of the ideas I had for blog posts as I can remember. At least we can all sigh heavily for what might have been:

  • There was the “big post” I mentioned weeks ago that I said I was working on, but I never wrote: Robert Patrick’s Cheep Theatricks is a book of plays still on my shelf, and I came across Robert Patrick, who is still alive, which kind of surprised me. I foolishly thought that all gay playwrights from the Village era were dead of AIDS or something. Idiot. Anyway, it opened up a whole stream of connected websites, including Patrick’s own scrapbook of the days at LaMama. The reason it resonated was that I did several of Patrick’s plays back in college: Kennedy’s Children, “Cornered,” and Kama Sutra, which is I swear is by Patrick but is not in Cheep Theatricks. Nostalgia.
  • Sarah Palin’s comment at Rolling Thunder, praising our veterans because “they give us our rights, not politicians or journalists.” Honey please. Can you say “fascistic thinking”? Only of course she’s so damned stupid that she doesn’t even know what she said.
  • Reinhold Gliére, whose three symphonies I snagged at an estate sale around the corner (along with a whole box of CDs at 75¢ each–woot!). He’s mostly (only) known for his ballet The Red Poppy, so I was interested in what else he had done. Since I was listening to these in the van while driving to Atlanta and back, I couldn’t do any due diligence by reading the CD inserts, so I had to form my opinions just from what I heard. Geez, I thought, here’s a composer who never got in trouble with the Soviet Composer’s Union. Dutiful, sometimes tuneful, always bombastic/heroic schlock. And so it proved. An interesting side note: when I had the van checked out for emissions, the young technician who did the tests came in and began chatting about his love for classical music. I told him I’d leave him the CDs when I was finished. I must do that.
  • The Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Savage Beauty.” It was the most intense artistic experience of the trip, a trip that included seeing Derek Jacobi in Lear and singing at Avery Fisher Hall. The man’s designs, his concepts, the craftmanship, all of it gorgeous. Very very scary, but every single bit of it beautiful. The design of the exhibit itself both showcased and competed with the fashion. It was perfect, and you walked out of it exhausted. Go to YouTube and look for videos of his shows.
  • Carefully generic post about how much fun I am having in my new job as director of GHP. It’s like one of those dreams where you are shoved out onto a tightrope, or you’re flying, and it’s very dicey but you find that somehow, miraculously, you can do it.
  • A typical post whining about how I have not worked on the cello sonata. Earlier this week I made myself pull out what I’d done so far on the second movement and listen to it. Sort of pulling the scab off kind of thing. It still worked, so that was good. The building blocks I thought I had come up with will serve. So now all I have to do is find the time to futz with it and cobble together something respectable to separate the first and third movements. I know, I’ll do that in my free time at GHP.
  • I treated myself to some items from my wish list on Amazon, and a couple of those were CDs of music by Lowell Liebermann, his piano concerti and his second symphony. The piano concerti did not impress (too many minor seconds, Herr Liebermann, too many minor seconds), but the symphony, a choral thing with texts by Whitman, was very nice. Still exploring that one.
  • How I became an ordained minister and a notary public in one week. And why.

I’m pretty sure there were more, but memory fails. If more bubble to the service, I’ll make a note of them–I can get another blog post of them.

So…

Posted on by Dale

So we finished singing Song of Wisdom from “Old Turtle” at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall and went to the nice dinner reception down the avenue. Good food, open bar, and finally I decided I would go speak to Dr. Tim Seelig, our phenomenal conductor.

He was talking with Rachel Gordon, choral conductor of Northgate High School and one of the soloists of the evening. I slid in and bragged that Rachel was my Susanna in Figaro, and we both said at the same time, “… nearly 10 years ago!” Good times.

Before I could bring up my next topic, however, Tim said, “And how are you doing? How’s that piece of yours?”

Oh. My. He remembered talking to me about William Blake’s Inn when he was in Newnan.

So I plunged right in and asked if I had ever sent him “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” because I honestly could not remember if I had. He thought not, because he always responds to those kinds of things.

May I, then? Certainly, he enthused. He’d love to take a look it.

Oh. My.

I figure I’ll give him a week to settle back in with his grandchild, then send it to him. If nothing else, I’ll get an unbiased assessment of its weaknesses.

Ideas & Design

Posted on by Dale

If you do not have Stumble as an add-on to your browser, you should. It’s a good way to waste time on the internet. I have come across many fun and useful sites using it in my downtime. Also my composing time.

Anyway, this morning I was up early, and resisting the urge to a) clean up my desk, which needs it badly; or b) take even a look at the cello sonata (you remember the cello sonata, yes?), I was Stumbling around the internet when this popped up: 100 Creative Furniture. Bad title, but fun post.

I love posts like this. I like seeing what other minds can do with ordinary objects, to make us “pay attention” to them again, as Milton Glaser would have it. Most of them are like the clothing you see on the runway in Paris or Milan, just conceptual pieces to show off. Just as you wonder whether anyone ever really wears that stuff, you have to wonder whether anyone ever really sits on some of those things.

Still, many of these look practical, and most provoke a little squee of delight as we recognize what the designer has done with “chair” or “sofa” or “shelf” or “table.” Almost none of them solve a problem other than the aesthetic “what if,” but that’s OK. Sometimes, as Lear says, it’s good to have superfluity.

It would be fun to put these into a slide show and show them to students (omitting always the buttocks) and assault them with the overwhelming fecundity of choice here, then challenge them to write about their favorite, or categorize them, or do something to engage the designers. Write a letter to one of the designers asking for changes in the design. Draw a sofa to go with the chair. Pick out a chair and a shelf unit for your bedroom. Examine your reaction to the “worst” of them and explain yourself. Match one of those outfits from Fashion Week to wear if you’re going to sit in that chair.

So many choices.

Fun weekend, and an addition to the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

We traveled down Hwy 27 on Friday to Colquitt, GA, where we stayed at the lovely Tarrer Inn, did Colquitt, and saw the famed Swamp Gravy.

It is worth the trip. If you don’t know what I’m talking about and are too lazy to click on the link, here’s the short version: the city of Colquitt decided to rescue itself from its doldrums back in the 90s by applying for some grants and creating a ‘folk life’ play from collected oral history. It was an immediate smash hit, and has been ongoing since then.

The town itself is almost nothing, and their grip on the tourism thing seems to extend mostly to having this fabulous theatre piece for a month of weekends twice a year. The building is an old cotton warehouse, and they’ve renovated it brilliantly, with a museum of local artifacts (without however any contextual explanations of any of the items on display).

The performance space is U-shaped stadium seating around a pit, with permanent multilevel platforms interspersed throughout. There is a large stage-ish area at the end of the U.

Community members from 4 to 70 rehearse the season’s play and then perform it for a month. The arts council collates a new script for October (or goes back to a previous script), and then it repeats in March. They also have a local show called May-Haw, which as the website says, is more for the townsfolk than the tourists.

Anyway, the show was good. This one was stories from the murals which dot the city (another of its attractions), all of which depict specific local events and people. On the whole, I thought it was probably weaker than their usual collections of folktales, ghost stories, and reminiscences, but parts of it were just glorious.

We intend to return to see another show. Yes, it was that entertaining. Plus, it warms my heart to see this tiny community pull off something this good.

I’ve said enough nice things, right? I can be a little catty now, can’t I?

Good.

In the window of one of the stores was this poster, for a trio singing at a local church. If you are a Colquittian who has stumbled on my blog, my sincerest apologies because y’all are some of the nicest people we’ve ever met, but this sent us into hysterics:

The lady in blue: exactly what is her hand doing? I promise I have not cut anything off. In fact, I had to redact the name of the group just to make sure I got as much of the thing in.

I hope this doesn’t ruin my chances to be considered as director for some future Swamp Gravy, because I think it would be a lot of fun. (And Swamp Gravy, I have ideas. Ask me how the elephant story could have been a showstopper.)

At one of the shops, an antiques/decor place, we came across this:

It’s bamboo. There was another chair like this, plus a ‘sofa’ and a table. Totally wobbly, so it would have to completely restored. I was thinking skulls on the uprights would be awesome. I could indulge in all my Mr. Kurtz fantasies. I did buy something from the shop, about which later.

This morning we started our drive back to Newnan, and somehow it became a thing for us to swerve off of HWY 27 to go take a gander at any and all small towns off the path. It was actually fun. Blakely—I think—had just had its “Peanut Proud” festival. (Colquitt has the Mayhaw Festival next month.) Bluffton had this enormous and ornate building, a former school perhaps, all boarded up. I wish we had a photo.

We stopped at Providence Canyon State Park:

Better pictures on the intertubes, but it was awesome. To see most of it, you have to hike, and we were prepared neither with shoes nor time, so we had to settle for these glimpses from the outer rim. It’s only 150 years old: settlers in the 1820s planted cotton, stripping the land of all vegetation and plowing up and down the hills rather than across. In 30 years, it looked like this. Can you imagine?

We also plan to return here to hike through the thing. There’s supposed to be a wildflower hike, but the website doesn’t mention it.

When we drove down Friday, we noticed a row of three small white churches off the highway. They all looked well-kept, and we thought it was odd to have three churches in a row like that. We jokingly suggested it was three hardshell Baptist churches, founded by three feuding branches of the same family. As we drove back up, we pulled off to see the Louvale Historical District. There doesn’t seem be an actual Louvale as such, but then we saw the three churches. They’re surrounded by a chainlink fence, but the gate was open, so we pulled up into the gate and looked.

As we looked, a car pulled up behind us, and a woman offered to show us around. Her daughter had gotten married in the Antioch Primitive Baptist Church, pictured above, and she had the keys. She explained that this was the Louvale Church Row, unique in the nation. Three churches and an old school, moved to this site and still active (the school is a community center). The buildings are immaculate, and the Antioch church was elegantly simple. And the acoustics were quite live! I’d love to perform there. (I just discovered that there’s a Historical Marker Database! Woot!)

Finally we made it home and I was able get out to the labyrinth to install my purchase from Colquitt:

Yes, the Apollo Belvedere, a foot-high bronze. For those who don’t know already, here is the skinny on the whole Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic. I hadn’t really been searching for avatars of these two forces, but when I saw this—and the price was right—I had to have it.

Now I need a bronze Dionysus. This is the only even halfway well-known one I might look for, but it seems almost tame, kind of Apollonian. So I just might go for the Barberini Faun. That’s Dionysian.

I am relieved

Posted on by Dale

Today’s email from Composer’s Datebook discusses Bartók’s Violin Concerto, and this passage struck me:

It was only in America, some years later, in 1943, that Bartók first heard his Concerto at a New York Philharmonic concert. He wrote, “I was most happy that there is nothing wrong with the scoring. Nothing needs to be changed, even though orchestral accompaniment of the violin is a very delicate business.”

Wow. This is what jumped out at me: “I was most happy that there is nothing wrong with the scoring.”

He actually was flying blind, not really sure that what he had inked in on the page would work in the concert hall. This is a great relief to me, because heretofore I had assumed that the great composers before this era knew how to write down precisely what they heard in their head, or if they didn’t hear it in their head they at least knew exactly what would produce the sound they wanted.

Not so much, it seems. I’m sure Mozart is the exception, but I’m going to go with a self-serving belief that many composers had to jigger with their pieces after hearing them played for the first time. At least I have a computer which will allow me to hear an approximation of what I’ve written.

Which actually ties in with a post I thought about writing this weekend after attending the Wadsworth concert. After hearing all this magnificent music (and some Chopin) played, I conceived a powerful desire to hear my music played live. I want to hear whether it actually works. Because of ‘the curse,’ of course, I’ve never heard any of my pieces played, but now I really have a hankering.

This puts me in an embarrassing position, because I have no more means now than I ever have had to have my music performed. Someone recently suggested that I pay local artists to play through the cello sonata, for example, but what if it’s too hard? That gets me nowhere, other than to put me back where I started 30 years ago, limiting my writing to the forces I have at hand.

It’s a conundrum.

Quickie

Posted on by Dale

I’m working on a longer post about the memory wormhole opened up by a chance encounter with the title of a play, but the wormhole has turned out to be much deeper than I thought so the post has taken a more involved turn.

In the meantime, I must report that I have not worked on the cello sonata in a week or so. Small crisis of confidence, which is waning but still there.

Yesterday afternoon, during the intermission of the Masterworks concert, a bunch of us were chatting about the piece we’ll be singing at Lincoln Center in June. It’s based on a children’s book that none of us were familiar with. I ruefully commented to one of our William Blake singers that whatever it was, it was not my piece based on a children’s book.

After the concert was over, I got in the van and decided to pull out the William Blake CD and listen to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” the infamous (to the singers) No. 10.

It’s gorgeous, folks, still. This morning, the CD picked up with “When We Get Home, Blake Calls for Fire.” I let it run, and this music still gets to me.

It restored my faith in my ability as a composer. At least of choral music based on children’s works.