Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Not exactly encouraging

Posted on by Dale

From today’s Composers Datebook:

In the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is held by the “Gothic Symphony “of the British composer Havergal Brian.

This Symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until some 40 years later, on June 24th in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster.

Brian was born in 1876, to working class parents, and despite his talent and the encouragement of his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, and the leading German composer of his day, Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his “Gothic” Symphony, Brian’s musical career never caught hold. Perhaps it was class discrimination, or simply poverty resulting from the personal disruption of two marriages and several children.

Whatever the reason, for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity. With the deaths of Elgar and Bantock, Brian lost what little collegial support he had. Only late in his life did his work start to attract attention, when composer and BBC music producer, Robert Simpson, discovered his music and arranged for some performances.

By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and Brian died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.

There it is. I actually acquired the “Gothic” years ago. It is a huge, sprawling, messy, glorious affair.

Fool’s errand

Posted on by Dale

I have been enjoying myself immensely creating ein Spaß for the campus, which I’ve chosen to call the Fool’s Errand. I have stolen wholesale the concept of Improv Everywhere‘s mp3 experiments, and almost wholesale the script and structure of their fourth endeavor, adapting it for the VSU campus and the GHP mindset.

The idea, for those of you who have not seen IE’s video, is for people to download an mp3 to their player, not listen to it, and then show up at the appointed time and place. Upon a signal, they begin to play the mp3 and to follow the directions from Steve, the omnipotent voice from above.

What follows is gentle silliness, the madness of crowds, and all-round street theatre. They follow a leader (Jobie in a fool’s hat), play a “fun game” on the pedestrian walk using the bricked streetscape, gather on West Lawn, take photos, do the “human dart board” thing, play freeze tag, and then suffer a ridiculous relaxation exercise from Kevin, Steve’s eternally annoying sidekick.

It’s been a lot of fun studying the original IE experiment, walking out the structure of it on our campus, making some creative changes, and finally writing the script and producing the mp3. In doing so, I’ve learned how to use GarageBand, Apple’s sound machine software. Very cool. I had started to use Logic Express, their consumer-level pro sound software, but GarageBand was a lot easier to deal with and accomplished exactly what I needed to do. Logic can wait till later.

Just now, as I went to transmogrify the .m4a file that GarageBand saves to disk into an .mp3 file for general consumption, I discovered that I own a third pro sound software tool: Apple’s Soundtrack. I honestly didn’t know I had it. It must have been installed with Final Cut Express, the video editing software that I use a lot. It allows you to preview your video in a little window and create literally the soundtrack for that video. After you get the timing right (and it has all those little video timing things), then you import the soundtrack into your video file. Sounds right handy, if one’s main focus in life were doing that kind of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking I might score the Fool’s Errand myself, but clearly I was not thinking clearly. I had two pieces from my new age album, Stars on Snow, both the title work and a bagatelle called “Air Pudding,” but that wasn’t nearly enough, and I don’t know how I thought I was going to have the time actually to write 25 more minutes of music.

So I ended up using other people’s music, a nice melange of Ray Lynch, Tosca, and that fraud Constance Demby. I did use “Stars on Snow” as the relaxation bit.

It should be a lot of fun. I’m keeping my authorship a secret from the kids, so it will be fun to go and be a part of it and watch it unfold. I’ll post a report on how it went.

Thoughts

Posted on by Dale

It’s Sunday night, June 1. I have packed my worldly possessions for the Great Trek south tomorrow morning, I’ve cooked a nice meal for my family, and now I sit in my backyard by the fire, blogging and thinking.

I’m alone, because it is 9:00 and I fear it is too late to call anyone to see if they’d like to come sit and drink with me. I know that’s wrong. I know at least one Lichtenbergian is sitting at home, wondering if there is fire and drink to be had anywhere in the Society, but I fear rejection. Sorry, guys.

I’ve watched Patagonia go up in flames, I may have mentioned that I weeded a couple hundred books from my collection at school: 25-year-old treatises on various countries that were above K-5 reading level anyway, and now wood is joining the fire.

Brief interlude, in which I have gone across the street because the neighbor lady’s young dog has been hit by a car. It is dead. Grayson and I have dug a grave for the poor thing, after assuring its owner that it is actually dead. I had just actually met the dog this afternoon, although it has been living there for at least a month after having taken up with the neighbor. Bless everyone’s heart. It is something of a mystery to put a still-warm being into a bag.

I have a new blog to read, World on Ice, written by my old friend Robyn Ice, an attorney in NYC. It was she who, years ago in the UGA costume shop, who first figured out there was something between Miss Henninger and myself and who asked about the nature of that relationship. I told her I was not sure what Miss Henninger felt, but I was certain that she was The One. “Then go and get her,” Robyn said. And so I did.

Robyn’s still-young blog sounds just like her: literate, warm, charming, witty. So far, it seems to be a lot about the great mysteries of being a Grown-Up. How did we get here, and how do we keep fooling the rest of the world?

I was going to bid on another Utilikilt on Ebay, but I missed it in being called to deal with the dog. Oh well. I should know by now that I should just order a new one and be done with it. (Although the model I was bidding on does not seem to be available right now from utilikilts.com.)

As I try to seal off my life here and get out of town for the summer, Jeff Bishop has written me asking me to contribute heavily to his article about the history of musicals in Newnan. I don’t like musicals. That’s why we did them only every other year, and why we never did the Top 10. But I’ll write something nice for public consumption.

Yes, I’m rambling, but it’s been a long day and I am coming to a point.

Here’s the point: tomorrow I drive to Valdosta to perform my duties as the assistant program director for the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program. All the data we have indicates that we are not bragging when we joke that we’re the best summer gifted experience around. If we’re the best in the U.S., then more than likely we’re the best in the world. And I’m the person with the most direct influence on what goes on in the classroom. I love this.

So other than working from 6:00 a.m. until 11:30 p.m. for six weeks, what do I hope to accomplish? Here’s a list:

  • Write two or three more songs for Day in the Moonlight.
  • Revamp “Sir Christémas” to include tabor and crotales along with organ.
  • Revamp my old handbell arrangment of “Come, Jeannette, Isabela” for the Welcome Christmas competition. It dawned on me to try to reverse the instrumentation: rather than handbell choir and soprano solo, turn the handbells into wordless voices and the soprano into French horn, the required accompaniment this year. It could work.
  • Take another look at IV. Lento. Since my work with Craig, I’ve actually had a couple of insights. So far it’s all mental. Let’s see if I can turn them into reality.
  • Take a poke at my suite for double bass.

And of course there’s the Lichtenbergian/Lacuna production of Coriolanus. So far, so interesting.

Does anyone have anything else they’d like me to work on?

Frabjous Day!

Posted on by Dale

Yes, yes, I know I haven’t written in weeks. It’s not that I’ve been busy, it’s that I’ve had nothing to say. I haven’t worked on any music since April, the news about Stephen not returning to GHP threw me for a loop, so sue me, and the meeting with Lee Johnson was interesting and fun but inconclusive, whatever that means, and most of my creative energy has gone into things that are better published over on lichtenbergian.org or lacunagroup.org. And there’s my annual early May funk, which on other blogs perhaps might be worth a whole week’s worth of posts, but I don’t presume that my irrational tailspins are of any interest, not even to me.

I might have written about Jeff and Marc and Grayson working on “What a Wonderful Bird the Frog Are” for the Masterworks Chorale concert tonight. I guess it’s important, since it’s the first time a choral piece of mine has ever had an actual performance, but really, “Frog Song”? It has a lot to recommend it (here are the score [pdf] and an mp3), but it’s hardly William Blake. They’re accompanying the chorus with “something percussive in nature,” which in their case means rubber mallets on a chest of drawers. If we can work out the finer points of the comedy before tonight, it should be quite amusing.

Anyway…

Today is the first, and only, day I have off between postplanning and GHP. I awoke early and got straight to my first task: cleaning my study and the stairs leading up to it. That’s mostly so I can drag down all the stuff I need to pack without tripping over crap.

Much of the stuff I’m straightening and tidying are not in point of fact mine. They belong to another person who lives in this house who, when faced with mounds of clutter, often buys containers in which to put said clutter and then puts the containers up in my study. So I was picking up all the family photos, framed, that have somehow escaped their containers when the interior decorator and this other person were scouring the house for stuff to redecorate the den with, when I came across this little black file box.

Since all this is in an area of my study that I don’t often go, mostly because of the mess but also because I don’t use the resources on those shelves very much, I hadn’t really paid attention to this box. I thought it was the old GHP box that my predecessor in the assistant director position had passed off to me. I haven’t used the box in years, as my systems and forms rapidly outgrew the box. (I will pass off a huge tub to the next person.)

As I looked at it, thinking I might actually be able to toss the contents, since I haven’t looked inside it for eight years, I also was getting some cognitive dissonance vibes: I remembered the box as being in another location, and I knew it didn’t have this translucent “pencil box” thing going on in the lid. What was in this box?

It wasn’t the old GHP stuff. It was the box I used to organize the score pages of Figaro for copying/collating for the cast. I had utterly forgotten about it. It was a thing of beauty: about a hundred file folders, the sturdy brown kind, each with a label printed out from a database I had created specifically for the purpose, showing the act, scene, the page numbers in the score, the number of copies I needed of those pages, and a check-box listing of the cast with who needed those pages. The file folders marched in even, unbroken thirds: left, center, right. Even I was impressed as I gazed upon it.

And in the translucent pencil box? A pencil, it looked like, and a sticky note pad. I opened it up.

It was not a sticky note pad. It was a cassette tape. With a shock, I realized what I had found.

It was Aces & Eights.

I hesitate even to write about this, since I’ve had very bad luck recently when I disparage anything. The internets is a creepy kind of magical place, and I just know if I write about this work, the original author is going to sense a disturbance in the Force and come looking for me. So, please, original author, who I am not going to name, thank you, just know that your work has given me untold hours of joy. In its own way.

Many many years ago, I hosted a theatre chat room on American Online called The Stage Door. We met every Monday night from 8:00-12:00 EST, and talked about theatre in our lives. Participants were many and varied: teens who would squeal about Rent, community types like me, professionals at many levels. We had actors, techies, lighting designers, musicians, directors. It was a fun time. That’s where I met Noah, who hosts all my websites. I met BrnySmurf, who yes, voiced Brainy Smurf and is now a casting director in LA. (He’s the smartass med student in the opening scene of Young Frankenstein.) Another regular was the music director of Guys & Dolls. Nicky Silver popped in every now and then, chatting about the woes of trying to find a gorgeous man who could act for Food Chain. (Silver, we finally did that show here. You owe me an autographed copy.) Steven Weber came barreling through one night, totally pumped up about the work he’d done on that day’s shoot of Jeffrey. Ah, the days when AOL was actually a community.

We also had a fair number of playwrights, and whenever they found I was the artistic director of NCTC, they’d ask if we took scripts. I always said yes. I guess those scripts are still down at the theatre. One or two of them were really interesting and we should have done them, at least in the Second Season venue.

So one night, a girl in the room realizes that I’m open to receiving scripts, and she enthuses about her boyfriend’s musical. Can she send me their tape? Certainly, says I. A couple of days later, I get Aces & Eights: a musical play about Wild Bill Hickok.

Oh my. I think many of you who read this blog have actually heard the tape, so you’ll know what I mean when I say that the contents of that tape were the most appalling collection of songs ever written. In listening to it in my van, I actually had to pull off the road a couple of times because I was gasping for breath. Yes, it is that bad.

I was supposed to return the tape, but I never did. I couldn’t. Here was the world’s worst musical, in my hands. How could I give that up? Fortunately, I never heard from the girl or her author/composer/lyricist boyfriend again. (Given my luck with this kind of post recently, I bet I do now. Pace, guys. You’re just going to have to forgive me.)

One can always forgive the clunky synthesized sound, at least I hope we can always do that, and I know that if I tried to record William Blake’s Inn singlehandedly with maybe Marc and Ginny and Mary Frances, that our end result might not sound any better than this. However, technical quality is not the issue. Artistic quality, alas, is.

Melody? Not so much, and he must have planned for Wild Bill to be played by Mandy Patinkin, since the vocal range on many of the songs forced him down an octave mid-phrase. Accompaniment? Leaden, or ear-grindingly repetitious. Lyrics? This is where the creator really shines. You have never heard such ghastly stuff in your life: sledgehammer rhymes, inapposite images, abandoned scansion, you name it, he kills it. Dead. Over and over and over.

After listening to it for a while, it was no longer funny. We all know what it takes to create something, anything, and even my sympathies were engaged. For a while. Then it became funny again, and it remains so to this day. I would bring it to rehearsals at the theatre at that point just before we’d begin running the show, when everything is falling apart and everyone wants to quit, and I’d play it just to remind everybody that no matter how bad we think things are going, we are not as talentless as these people.

In the creator’s defense, I have to agree with Grayson, who commented one day as we got out of the van: “He actually has a good idea, and all the songs are exactly where they need to be and are about the right thing in the script. It’s just that he’s no good. If he were talented, it would be a great show.” The great Lichtenbergian fear, indeed.

It must have been a couple of years ago that I decided I needed to transfer it to CD so that it wouldn’t be lost forever. But then, horrors!, I couldn’t find it. I thought I could remember putting it somewhere for safekeeping, but it wasn’t any of the places I would have chosen for that purpose. It was gone. I truly grieved. Aces & Eights held a special place in my life, and I was distraught thinking I’d never have it again. Worst of all, I’ve had to rely on my own work for bottom-of-the-barrel comparisons, and you know how depressing that is. (Viz., IV. Lento)

So every May, when I printed out my packing list for GHP (another database… stop laughing at me), there would be Aces & Eights on the list to pack, to get the VSU media people to transfer it for me, and I’d make another half-hearted attempt to locate it, but in vain.

Until today! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I am chortling in my joy.

A step forward?

Posted on by Dale

Next Thursday, May 15, I’ll be heading down to LaGrange to meet with Lee Johnson, composer. He was recommended by Jeff Baxter as a potential instructor for me, and he’s agreed to meet with me and discuss it. I’m taking the score to IV. Lento with me to amuse him.

In other news, last night I received an offer that was very difficult to turn down: the opportunity to collaborate on a musical version of Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula, for performance this Halloween in Grantville or environs. Because of my longstanding commitment to A Day in the Moonlight, I felt I had to decline. But you can understand how tempting it was, from so many perspectives.

45 days

Posted on by Dale

I don’t even know how to begin this post. I thought about something like, “You know why George Lichtenberg gives up on his symphony?” or something about the number of days left in the countdown, but I’m not up to being clever.

Stephen Czarkowksi, GHP’s fabulous string teacher/orchestral conductor, who requested I write this piece, will not be returning this summer, having other opportunities he should not pass up. There is no reason for me to keep working on Symphony in G major.

I’ve just been kind of numb, kind of nauseated, since this afternoon when I got Stephen’s email. This is a huge disappointment for me, needless to say, and coming on the heels of the news about the theatre losing the building, I’ve been thrown for a loop.

Oh well, easy come, easy go. I can at least get back to work on A Day in the Moonlight, I guess.

46 days: III. Allegro gracioso

Posted on by Dale

As far as I can tell, it’s finished. I mean, it needs cymbals here and there and I wish Finale would simply crash a cymbal when I click a note into the score but it won’t so there you are. And it’s still not being at all subtle or even appropriate with the dynamics. But I think it’s done.

The last time you heard it was on 4/3/08.

Here’s III. Allegro gracioso, finished. I think you will be surprised. And hopefully pleased.

Next: IV. Lento. This time I mean business.

Day 47

Posted on by Dale

Happy Shakespeare’s birthday!

I directed the first Shakespeare in Newnan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1978. I directed the last, The Taming of the Shrew, in 1999.

I say “last,” but that’s just a bitter, depressed guess: the Newnan Theatre Company has been served eviction papers from the building, they haven’t paid the rent in over a year, and the board has voted to vacate. My understanding is that they intend to go on, somehow, but I know no details.

This has disturbed me a lot more than I thought it would, and more than I think it should. I guess I have enough vanity to be disappointed that something I spent nearly 30 years of my life building should come unravelled within five years of my leaving it, and leaving it on sound footing, I might add.

We had money in the bank, full houses, and a growing subscribers list. We had a Main Stage season, the Second Season, and the children’s season, and a teen season. We performed more than 40 weekends out of the year. There simply were no more weekends in the year to squeeze in another show.

We did Shakespeare. We did musicals. We encouraged new works. We experimented with new forms and approaches. We built our costumes and sets. We designed our costumes and sets. We trained people in all the crafts of theatre. We did theatre, not put on plays.

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I may have more to say later, over at lichtenbergian.org.

50 days: Almost

Posted on by Dale

My goal this week is to finish III. Allegro gracioso, which means essentially getting it orchestrated.

This morning I got all of it done except for the last big bit, and I want to dig in and listen to what I’ve got so far before tackling it.

A week from today, the countdown will be 42 days, which is the number of days in GHP, so it’s kind of a temporal mirror thing I’ll have going on here. Now it gets scary, because the following week will be more or less lost to me: Tuesday and Wednesday nights, my regular composition nights, I’ll be in Atlanta with the STAR program, so I won’t get any work done at all on my nemesis, IV. Lento.

However, I have to say that in listening to what I’ve got (and it’s all in tatters now with all the crap I’ve inserted and left lying around), I’ve swung back into the mindset that it’s not so bad after all. May Apollo keep me in that mind.

Also, as long as we’re counting days, the last six or seven days will also be lost, because I will be in Valdosta setting up GHP. I will not be composing anything at that point. That leaves, what, about 35 actual days? Sheesh.

Am I disappointed that I won’t have a complete symphony by June 2, the day I leave for Valdosta? A bit. But I’ll be happy to have the final two movements done, and maybe I can get at least a sketch for the first done while I’m there.

The second? Slow movements have been my downfall forever. However, I did come across this sketch from previous thinking, and you know what? It’s not too bad a beginning, I think.