Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Prelude No. 6, stab 1

Posted on by Dale

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)

Posted on by Dale

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.

ATCs, et al.

Posted on by Dale

Terry returned his Artist Trading Cards earlier in the week. I’ll have those out to the next artist on Monday.

In other news, I started tweaking Prelude (no fugue) No. 5 this morning. There was one measure, m.17, that bugged me. I know why: the harmonies/chords were slack. And I know why: it was one of those points to which I had taken a crowbar earlier, and those chords were an exact repeat of the earlier thread. I had inverted them, but that just weakened them. I considered un-inverting them and doubling them in the left hand, which would have made life a lot more interesting for the pianist, but after listening to the basic structure I decided it just needed new harmonies.

However, after tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, I found that I could best solve the problem by removing the measure altogether. I’m now claiming that the problem was structural, not harmonic.

More work is required.

Prelude No. 5, still

Posted on by Dale

I’m still working on Prelude (no fugue) No. 5. It’s giving me fits, largely I think because it’s not the kind of music “I” write. I’m having to discover how to handle themes and motifs that are not a natural part of my musical language.

I persevere, however. I’m going to have at least some idea of how to structure it by lunchtime today. Which is 30 minutes away, so I’d better stop blogging and start banging my head against the keyboard. Figuratively.

update: Tell me what you think. I know what I think.

Prelude (no fugue) No. 5: score | mp3

(The first four Preludes can be found here.)

The big thing

Posted on by Dale

Last night, after a particularly adventurous night in the labyrinth, I was reading while waiting for my stomach to calm down. After someone on Facebook quoted the last two lines of Romeo and Juliet a couple of weeks ago, I had dug out my copy of the script of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, the gargantuan theatre project staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company back in the 80s. My purpose was to snag the last two lines of the Vincent Crummles’ Acting Troupe edition of R&J, since they so notably and hilariously allow the main characters to live.

But then I kept the book out as bathroom reading material. Fun to read, fun to remember the PBS broadcast of the event, and familiar. Last night I finished up the last of the book, and of course burst into tears. That didn’t do my stomach or nasal passages any favors, but let that pass.

What’s the deal? Why does this script (and the memory of its performance) affect me so? Because it does affect me, every time I read it, see it, or think about it. Well, first of all, of course, there’s Smike. David Threlfall’s performance is one of the triumphs of theatre art, and no one can be unaffected by the pathos of the character. (Yes, I know Wilde’s assessment of Dickens’ pathos: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”)

But then I got to the very end of the show, and burst out crying again. Yes, there is the emotion of the ending (everyone happy, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” tableau, shivering outcast down center, Nicholas breaks out of his comfortable warmth to pick up the waif), but for me there is something bigger going on, and that is the show itself. It’s an enormous artifact: seven and a half hours of performance, some thirty actors playing more than a hundred characters, a complete rendition of a Dickens novel, a metatheatrical work of dazzling energy, developed from scratch by the RSC.

That’s the lure for me: this was a group project from the very first. The RSC needed something to keep the company going at the time, something that would keep everyone employed but not cost too much to stage. Nicholas Nickleby was their decision. I was there, actually. Christmas of 1979, Ginny and I went to London with our inestimable costume professor Dr. Jackson Kesler. Part of the obligatory trip to Stratford included (besides yet another autumnal rendition of Twelfth Night) a tour of the facility. When we got to the rehearsal rooms, I was struck by the enormous amount of material about Victorian London taped to the walls. Odd, I thought, I wonder what they’re up to? They were up to Nicholas Nickleby.

I want that. Perhaps this is one of my regrets before dying, that I would have loved to have been a part of something that huge, that dedicated, that crazy. I’m under no illusions about the perils of such ventures; in fact, there’s an entire book on how the RSC did it, and it wasn’t pretty or comfortable. But it was exhilarating, and I want that.

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings affects me the same way. Heaven knows I despise the act of movie-making as one of the most boring of livelihoods (www.flyboyfilms.tv notwithstanding). But LoTR overwhelmed me with its quiddity, its reity. The whole earth-moving, earth-creating (literally) aspect of the movie made me want to be a part of that. I will be the first to say that the movies are fundamentally flawed in their execution, but that does not obviate the amazing fact that they exist. They were created, and on a scale that mocks me.

I had hopes a couple of years ago that William Blake’s Inn was going to be that kind of venture for us, because certainly the “cardboard and hot glue” workshops we did for the preview were like peepholes into that vast darkness, and I was excited by that. But WBI went nowhere.

Practicality. I don’t have time. The forty other people I want to drag into the abyss with me don’t have time.

Something to ponder.

Composing myself

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been working—I really have—on Prelude (no fugue) No. 5, and I’m making progress. My problem is finding the time. You would think that since I have no evening commitments on the calendar, this week would have been a good time to dig in and figure out how to make it work.

Sadly, no.

By the time I get supper made, get supper eaten, and touch base with my lovely first wife, it is deep into the evening. I am lucky to get even an hour of time in my study, and since it takes me 20 minutes to disentangle my brain from everything but what’s in front of it, that’s not a lot of time before my body is saying that it’s time to call it quits for another day.

I have made progress. It was solid and was saying essentially what I wanted it to say, but last night I took a crowbar to it and broke it open, and suddenly it threatened to veer out of control , and that’s a good thing. So now I’m faced with continuing that energy into the middle and end of the piece. Will I have time to do that?

This weekend, of course, is given over to relaxing, although I may have time on Sunday to squeeze in a few notes. Next week I have to revamp the GHP parent video, so there’s limited time there. Plus it’s my lovely first wife’s birthday, which is always festive.

It makes me wonder whether I’m going to get a cello sonata written by October.

Regrets of the dying

Posted on by Dale

Today on Facebook, this link was flying around. I went to read it, thinking it might be thought-provoking, and it was, even if not in the way most people might respond to it.

First of all, let me state that Ms. Ware is quite right in her observations. I have no issue with her list nor her explications. However, I wanted more from her list when I went there. I have worked my whole life not to be one of the mass of men living lives of quiet desperation, and I think I have completely and successfully escaped Ms. Ware’s list. Whatever else happens, I will not look back on my life with those regrets.

So if I expected more, what was it I hoped to find? What will I feel compelled to tell my hospice worker?

I think my biggest regret at the moment is my laziness in getting my work done. Notice that’s not the same as Keat’s “fears that I may cease to be/ Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” I’m quite at rest with the idea that I may never get around to everything I might have done. The Symphony may never be written, the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait may never be completed, and I certainly am not on track to get grass to flourish in the labyrinth. (At the advice of a Home Depot gardening employee, I have fertilized the bare dirt.)

My regret is that I will not have finished things I might have finished because I just didn’t take the time to get them done. Why am I writing this instead of working on Piano Prelude (no fugue) No. 5? As every good Lichtenbergian could tell you, I am writing this so that I don’t have to confront the Piano Prelude. Or the cello sonata. Or the Ayshire Fiddle Orchestra piece. Or the color charts for my painting. Or any of the exercises in Keys to Drawing.

(To assuage my future guilt, I just now went and added two notes to the prelude. I can goof off another 48 hours now.)

Any regrets I might have had, i.e., based on who I was even five years ago, are invalid. Those who have known me for a while might think I would have regrets about my organizational successes and failures: NCTC, GHP, Newnan Crossing, Lacuna/William Blake. But no. Those things come and go in any person’s life, and it’s just simple wisdom not to base your idea of a well-lived life on achievements—or not—in those arenas.

I will say that if I come to the end of my life and I’ve never seen/heard William Blake’s Inn performed, I will be disappointed, but that’s not a regret since I have no real control of whether that happens or not.

What else? I’m not a deep thinker, so I may have to settle for this one regret. I think it is a worthwhile one. Let’s see if I can be worthy of it.

ATC: next round

Posted on by Dale

I sent out Kevin’s ATC in the mail this morning, and since I got Mike’s this afternoon, I can send out the next ones tomorrow. More about who our next artists are tomorrow perhaps.