Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
Prelude (no fugue) No. 6
Provisionally. Consider this a beta version. Maila, if you download it, don’t commit it to memory yet.
Prelude (no fugue) No. 6: score | mp3
It’s a huge sloppy mess, and as usual I think it is too short. However, I’m going to leave it as is, I think, unless obsessive listenings over the next few days reveal some obvious tweaks I need to make.
You can get all six preludes (but no fugues) here.
Note: the version in this post is in fact the beta version. You can hear the completed version here and here.
Prelude 6, stab 6
One step forward, five steps sideways.
In playing with the tone-row that is the theme of Prelude No. 6, I transposed some notes octavewise to smooth out some of the spiky leaps , and found that the two halves of the theme are identical and lead into each other. I could make the harmonies of each half the same, but that would be boring.
The bigger problem is that, left to itself, the theme is static in the extreme. I will have to break it up to get it to go anywhere.
I played with several modulations, mostly rhythmical. None are grabbing me at this point. I am truly in the phase of creating a lot of crap.
I did write an ending which grew on me.
The situation is this: I have to take that step out into the void and create such weird, useless, lame crap that something decent will appear in order to balance it out.
Prelude 6, stab 5, et al.
I didn’t have email because my provider had migrated my account over to the new server, and his email telling me about all that got caught up on the transfer and didn’t go out until it went to the new server. Oops. All is well now, however.
I worked on Prelude 6 again last night, struggling with the harmonization of the tone-row. I didn’t like the middle, where the notes wander without real purpose and so the harmonies have to be rather forceful to get you to follow along. I believe I have that fixed now. Tonight I will work on the ending, which I think is necessary because I need a boffo finish, as we used to say in vaudeville, and I don’t want to leave it to chance.
In other news, I got the next set of Artist Trading Cards mailed off, finally. Terry had sent me his last week, and I had just lazed about before sending them off again. I’ll reveal the next artist in a couple of days. No word from Craig, who got the other set.
I have a couple of composition competition deadlines coming up next week. I had one last week, but upon close examination it turned out that “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” was too big for the criteria, and the “Allegro Gracioso” from the symphony was actually too short. Feh. I guess I should go through all the upcoming competitions with a similar fine-toothed comb so I can go ahead and get them off my schedule.
No email
Prelude No. 6, stab 2/3/4
As promised, I have been stabbing away at Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, and by George, I think I’ve got it. So naturally I’m taking a break.
First of all, it occurred to me that the sounds (“Piano Moods” by one Herbert Boland) I had downloaded from freesound.com to make a warning sound for my teaching periods at school would make awesome ringtones. Thanks, Herbert!
(I used GarageBand to combine three minutes worth of Boland’s sounds to make this warning sound. We’ll be deep in some kind of info skills work, and from nowhere comes the sound of the “time fairies,” as the kids have nicknamed it. Very gentle, very nice, and it gives us three minutes to put our work away and get ready to leave.)
So, Prelude No. 6. I had sketched out a nice little ditty previously, but set it aside to see what else I could come up with. (Here’s the mp3 of that sketch.) This morning, I started afresh with a quiet, simple theme which I then could repeat at a fugue-like interval: Prelude 6-2_sketch. There’s the opening thematic statements, then a little break, then a trial run of how I could play with the theme and defeat the expectation of the fugue.
Then I took a break, since it was going well, of course, and picked up a book, Labyrinths, by Sig Lonegren, which I had not opened in months. Just kind of thumbed through it and all of its New Age-y moonbattery. That’s where I found, on p. 139, his correlation of the paths of the 11-circuit labyrinth (mine is a 7-circuit) to the notes of the scale. Well, who could resist that?
So now I have a twelve-tone row, which I am treating as a tonal progression, in a non-fugue kind of way. To wit: Prelude 6-3_sketch. Notice the nice opening theme, which leads into a fugal statement. There’s a break, and then I try out a chord progression for the notes, both in the tonic and the dominant.
That’s where I am at the moment. It’s lunch time, and I’m happy. Now all I have to do is write the damned thing.
Oh, and the first one I think is going to be used in the cello sonata.
Random thoughts
I have come in from the labyrinth to chill before bedtime. I decided to watch an old movie called Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s strangest film. So far it’s incoherent, as promised in everything I’ve read about it. It stars Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, and “Groucho Marx playing ‘God'” , and introducing Austin Pendleton.
More about this later.
[I’m going to post this and continue live-blogging.]
It’s my plan to continue hacking away at the nothing that is Prelude No. 6 tomorrow morning. It has not escaped my notice that my usual modus operandi is not operational, to wit, I do not feel the urge to distract myself with my art. In the past, it has been easy to switch back and forth. When the music wasn’t going well, I’d sketch or paint, and vice versa.
But this time, I only feel the need to work on the music because it’s actually due for actual performance. I’m a little nonplussed about that. Am I getting further behind on the ELP? Can’t be helped.
The movie also has Michael Constantine and Richard Kiel and Slim Pickens. It has atrocious sound. Also nudity and drugs. Jackie Gleason just licked some stationery belonging to Austin Pendleton which is soaked in LSD. He’s tripping. Badly, I might add.
“Mathematics!”
‘God,’ by the way, is the head of the crime syndicate, not any sort of deity. I for one am disappointed.
The acid trip is overextended and stupidly “psychological.”
Now we’re on God’s ship. The dialog is almost random and the characterization even moreso.
Poor Austin Pendleton. This was his first film? He just dumped his entire stationery “stock” into the bread machine of the penitentiary kitchen.
The whole prison is tripping. One of the guards saw the prisoners as the Green Bay Packers , naked , and now the garbage cans are dancing in posterized colors. Silly.
Such bad acting. Was this Preminger’s attempt to be hip?
Now the hippies are attacking God’s boat. The whole thing looks as if it was shot in one weekend. Carol Channing in some kind of Revolutionary War getup leading the attack in a musical number, “Skidoo,” of course. Peace, love, and unplugged electric guitars. Oh, and an inadvertent crotch-shot of Ms. Channing, who earlier was lounging in tights and bra in Frankie Avalon’s bachelor pad. She actually looked pretty good.
Now Gleason, having escaped from prison in a hot air balloon, wanders through the hippie crowd asking “Where’s God? Does anyone know where God is?”
Austin and Groucho are on a sailboat, escaping, toking on joints.
Mercy. At least the costumes, by Rudi Gernreich, were impressive. I know this because they’re singing the entire credits to us now.
Prelude No. 6, stab 1
I sat down last night determined, not to write Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, but to futz around on the keyboard until I had some valid ideas. Further, I decided not to do it on the computer screen, i.e., in Finale, but to use my Moleskine music sketchbook for the purpose for which I bought it.
So for two hours I tinkled and banged and tried to explore. I wrote down three motifs. I came up with nothing.
It occurred to me this morning that if I rely on what I can do with piano and paper, then all I’m going to get is John W. Schaum’s Purple Book at best, because that’s the level of my pianistic ability. So tonight I will return to the method that produced the other Preludes, which is actually a version of drawing the music on the computer screen.
A realization (minor)
Recently I blogged about big projects, among them the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. I told the personal bit about having been in Stratford during the period they were working on it.
I couldn’t find my copy of The Nicholas Nickleby Story, in which one of the three directors of the project recounts how it all happened. I must have given it to the theatre. (Or it may be possible, since I had the wrong size/color of book in my head, I simply overlooked it over on my shelves.) At any rate, I ordered a used one from Amazon.
I had forgotten that the whole thing started out very cautiously, with a five-week period of experimentation after which the members of the company had the option of not continuing with the work if they didn’t think it was going to work. Five weeks was not enough, of course, so they voted to extend it another three weeks, i.e., after the Christmas break.
That’s when we were there: during the first rush of research and improvisation and figuring out how or even whether they could do this thing. They had just come back from break and were hurtling toward the final reckoning, the fish-or-cut-bait moment when they would either stop the project or continue. Wow.