Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Cello sonata, take 1

Posted on by Dale

Rather than allow those piano preludes to take up permanent residence in my head, I pulled up some files this morning that I had saved back when I was distracting myself from those piano preludes with short stabs at the cello sonata, and I got to work on the sonata. My theory is that if I get the new music planted in my head, I can start working out all the problems that I know are going to come with , once again , plowing unfamiliar ground.

So far it seems to be working. I cheated—a bit—by pulling up an old Prelude No. 6 sketch and recasting it for the cello and piano. It has a nice elegiac sound to it, so I think this is going to be the third movement, kind of a free-form rhapsody kind of a thing.

I seem to have an irrational fear that I’ll be accused of relying on traditional form. What?? That’s what they’re there for, you idiot. So why not go ahead and plan for the third movement to be a sonata allegro or a theme & variation or something. I don’t know.

In addition, the free-form idea for the third movement is problematic in that the slow movement will probably also be free-form. And the Ayshire sketch that I keep thinking will be the first movement is similarly slow and meditative, though I do plan a sonata allegro there.

It seems I have some more thinking to do. Maybe I’ll make the middle movement a scherzo. Take that, traditional form!

At the end of the day, I have to confess that what I got onto the screen was so interesting and so vital that it scared me. I’ve been listening to it off and on all day, but I haven’t dared work on it more. I need to understand, at least in some way, what I’ve done so that I can extend it into a full movement. I’m not going to share at the moment. Well, OK, I will, but it’s just the first stab. Literally.

There’s a gap in the accompaniment where I haven’t worked on the cello melody, followed by a resumption where I knew exactly what should happen. (Only, it didn’t.) There’s also this odd hiccup at one point where the piano is playing what sounds like staccato notes in the left hand and it’s written to be sustained quarter notes under the quintuplets. Yes, that’s right, you’re hearing quintuplets. Cello Sonata: Stab One.

The inadequacy of the computer in translating live players has never been more clear. Hear it under lights, as we say.

Discuss: is it as interesting, as—dare I say?—ravishing as it sounded to me all day today?

Prelude (no fugue) No. 6, no kidding

Posted on by Dale

All right, I know you’ve heard this before, baby, but I swear this time it’s true. I have absolutely finished with Prelude (no fugue) No. 6.

Funny how it happened. I needed one more variation in the first third, for bulk, as it were, and I put in this tiny little baroque thing. It sounded puny, though, and before I knew it I was adding the second voice. That sounded awful, just amateurish plopping of notes in there with no sense of voice leading, which would be because I have only the vaguest of notions about voice leading. It didn’t go anywhere.

You didn’t get to hear it in that state. Be grateful. I don’t mind sharing my process, but exposing my incompetence would be just plain stupid.

So early this morning, I awoke with the idea of making it a minor key variation. I began futzing with it, literally moving notes around on the screen until it flowed not only smoothly but interestingly. I think it works.

I also stuck in a three-measure transition into the middle section which I’m still not convinced of, but perhaps it will grow on me. Comments are welcome.

Prelude (no fugue) No. 6: score | mp3

Yes, Maila, you may begin learning it.

In other news, my lovely first wife’s birthday present finally arrived: the new Apple TV. (Did you know that a straight line between Hong Kong and Atlanta goes through Anchorage? Get a globe and a piece of string: it’s astonishing. Good bar bet.)

Wow. I know I’m an Apple fanboy, but wow. First of all, it’s tiny, like not even four inches square. It’s cheap(ish) at $99, although it does not come with the actual HDMI/optical audio cables you need to hook it up. (The website tells you that.) And it’s astoundingly flawless. Plug it in. Select the input on your television. Answer its questions. And you’re streaming video from Netflix, YouTube, the iTunes store, iTunes itself, even iPhoto.

It was fun pulling in the Six Preludes (No Fugues) from upstairs and playing it on the television, with the “album cover” in all its glory filling the screen. It was fun pulling in the 2005 Rotunda Concert performance of “Sonnet 18” from YouTube. It was fun checking out what is actually available from Netflix for streaming (not everything is at the moment.)

I think I noticed some video quality issues in the Netflix movie we watched, but then I’m not impressed with the TV’s regular video quality. All those high-def images one sees on the TVs in the stores? They are not to be had in real life, period, so I’m content.

The tech writers have had a field day (the thing just started shipping last week) taking it apart and looking under the hood. Apparently it’s essentially an iPad, capable of storing and running apps. There’s a thing called AirPlay, where you can stream from your iOS device (iPhone, iTouch, iPad), and that apparently can be used by any app. No one seems to know what this portends. Reply hazy, ask again later, it seems.

And now I have to go relearn all those 17th century dances that I researched and taught but rarely danced 35 years ago.

Muddling through

Posted on by Dale

Let’s see. I had a cat go into surgery to find out why he couldn’t keep food down, and they found nothing, yet he’s back to snarfing canned cat food as if it’s nachos with no ill effects. He insists on climbing stairs and jumping onto furniture , a big no-no , and he won’t take his medicine.

I had a battery and cable die on me and so had to have the van repaired.

I went back into Prelude No. 6 and stuck another little baroque-y bit in before the 12/8 section–and then it started turning into a two-part invention which I am completely unqualified to write , so I’ve been hammering my way through that and it sucks.

I mailed off “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” to a competition elsewhere. The Newnan Vortex™ being what it is, I think I will not mention the name of the competition, because submissions are to be anonymized. (Scores are marked with a nom de guerre and a sealed envelope contains our identities.) Still, even if someone in V_____ came across this post, let’s face it: I’m still anonymous as far as they’re concerned.

I missed a competition deadline, a choral group celebrating some anniversary, because I do not have an a capella piece in my portfolio and didn’t have time to write one. After the cello sonata. Between the Ayshire piece. Sometime.

So it’s no wonder that my acid reflux has bubbled back up. Feh.

On the horizon, though, there’s hope: the Lichtenbergian Annual Retreat! Only 13 days! (Please, please, please let me have started the cello sonata by then!)

Prelude (no fugue) No. 6

Posted on by Dale

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

Posted on by Dale

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.

Posted on by Dale

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.

Prelude No. 6, stab 2/3/4

Posted on by Dale

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

Posted on by Dale

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.