Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

91 days: no progress

Posted on by Dale

After a late night last night at the Venetian Ball, a fundraiser for the Centre and a whole lot of fun, I was in no shape to work seriously on the symphony, despite not having touched it in days.

This afternoon I opened it up and toyed with the harmonies in the Grandiose Bit. I’d been thinking that the three repetitions of the two-measure phrase was just a bit too repetitious, so I played with changing the middle repetition a bit.

It didn’t really work, but that was because I’ve had my laptop in the living room all weekend instead of upstairs, where I can actually figure these things out on the keyboard. Changing one chord was such a mess that I decided against playing with it any further and reverted to the original. Maybe tomorrow or Tuesday I’ll try again.

Later in the evening I worked on the Lichtenbergian website, adding the seal to the header, and the author to each post. That actually took a while, because CSS/PHP is cranky. But now we know who wrote each post, at least.

I have been most impressed with my fellow Lichtenbergians’ mock exposés of themselves. Varying degrees of outrage and satire abound. I am actually keenly awaiting the exposés of some members who are in reality the more outrageous of us all: Matthew, Mike, Craig and Jobie. If they don’t post by the middle of the week, perhaps the rest of us can write one for them.

94 days: Impossible people

Posted on by Dale

From today’s Writer’s Almanac email:

One day in January of 1965, the complete first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him suddenly while he was driving his car from Mexico City to Acapulco. He came home that night and told his wife not to bother him and locked himself in a room for eight to 10 hours a day for the next 18 months and wrote the novel. The original manuscript was 1,200 pages long, and García Márquez pawned their heater and his wife’s hair dryer to pay for the postage to send the novel out to publishers.

Damn. Just damn.

95 days: Busy, busy

Posted on by Dale

A preview of what I have on my plate tonight:

  • cooking supper
  • paying bills, planning my finances for the next few months
  • putting together a video of our hearing-impaired students saying the Pledge of Allegiance for Friday morning’s announcements, complete with closed-captioning for those who are not hearing-impaired
  • my exposé of me for over at lichtenbergian.org
  • a job description of the GHP media position, plus communicating with our three applicants, which I should have done over the weekend
  • laying out the program for this weekend’s concert of Fauré’s Requiem, if I get the rest of the info from Bizarth
  • writing letters of reference for some GHP instructors
  • perhaps some work on the symphony

I’ll have updated results later.

later: I got the first three done. Cras melior est.

Day 96: IV. Lento, getting there

Posted on by Dale

I think it’s getting more and more solid. And I think you’re going to be very surprised at the progress I’ve made.

Here’s the mp3, starting as the Lento section winds down, into the Rachmaninov Ripoff™ theme, the Obligatory Repeat, some really nice variations of the RR™ theme, and then into the agitato variations which you’ve heard before. Still petering out after the segue back into the minor agitato.

Ginny says she thinks the approach to the minor agitato is weak, and she may be right. Since that’s my next target, I’ll be listening very carefully to it.

96 days

Posted on by Dale

All right, what gives?

In the past two days, we have…

  • Misha Defonseca, 71, Belgian, whose memoir (Surviving with Wolves) about her fleeing from Nazis and being sheltered by wolves was, oddly, fiction. Not real. “It is not actually reality,” she pleads, “but my reality, my way of surviving… I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost.” Her real name appears to be Monique De Wael.
  • Margaret B. Jones, 33, whose “critically acclaimed memoir” Love and Consequences is not in fact about her life, given that she grew up in a well-to-do nuclear family in an affluent suburb, not in foster homes in gang-riven South-Central LA. “I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Jones. “I did not do it right.” Her real name is in fact Margaret Seltzer.
  • Robert Irvine, 42, celebrity chef of Dinner Impossible on Food Network (‘ware, Marc!), is not in fact a British knight, owner of a castle in Scotland, or chummy with Prince Charles. He felt pressure “to keep up with the Joneses,” he said. Whether he meant Margaret B. Jones is unclear, and Robert Irvine is apparently his real name.

This is preposterous. What is with people, that they seek fame and fortune by creating stupendously bogus lives? Certainly, I wish I lived a more exciting and monetarily rewarding life, but on the whole my life is pretty glamorous as it is. And anything I concocted would be shot down in less time than it took for Margaret Seltzer’s sister to see her photo in the New York Times and call the publisher to blow the whistle.

As Georg C. Lichtenberg says, “Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. (D.25)” So here’s your assignment, Lichtenbergians: hie thee over to the Waste Book and create the news story (in the Times, of course) about your newfound fame collapsing because of your outrageous lies have been detected. Make sure to include your excuses/apologies.

97 days

Posted on by Dale

It being a Monday, I didn’t get any work done on the piece, other than listening to it in the car going here and there.

The other reason I got not a lot done is that lichtenbergian.org finally came through: whatever Noah’s been tied up with finally let him loose enough to give me access to the domain. Within minutes hours I had our blog up and running, including the beginnings of a huge collection of Georg Christoph’s aphorisms.

So, Lichtenbergians, pile in.

98 days, part III

Posted on by Dale

I worked all morning, then drove to Lenox to find a tux shirt. On the way I listened to my latest efforts, and these are the notes I scribbled on the way up and back:

  • + bassoon to RR echo (ended up not necessary)
  • stronger minor [chord] after duet (it’s a major chord; see below)
  • extend duet? (not yet, but I may still)
  • + woodw to 2nd [building phrase] (not today, but I will)
  • downbows on 2nd [building phrase] (done)
  • string pad for duet? (haven’t tried it yet)
  • A major m. before D7 m.? (did that, it worked)
  • continue Eng. horn to B (did that, it worked)
  • alt. up and downbow on 3rd [building phrase] (done)
  • extra E major m. [after duet] (did that, will double-check it)
  • 1/2 notes for Grandiose brass [chorale] (tried it, discarded it)

And with that, my next bit of work will be the minor agitato section: extend that and get us back to the Grand Recapitulation of the Rachmaninov Ripoff™ theme.

You may recall a gentle, wistful version of the agitato theme. I think that’s actually going to be the coda of this whole thing: a lullaby to put it all to bed, only with one final chordal sequence to swell to double forte, of course.

98 days, part II

Posted on by Dale

If any of you like that part that follows the Grandiose Bit, where the agitato theme enters in G major in the strings with staccato brass, speak now, because I think it’s going to go away. Personally, I think it sounds silly, and with the variations I’m ringing on the Rachamaninov Ripoff™ theme, I think I can head straight into the clarinet statement of the agitato theme.

100 days

Posted on by Dale

I have a widget counting down the days to GHP and hence to the day that I might be reasonably expected to turn over a score to Stephen Czarkowski for a summer performance.

It now says 100 days and some odd hours/minutes.

Feh.

I know, I’ll begin a hysterical daily countdown post. Sort of like the 365 project, only really really neurotic and probably not as entertaining, unless you like watching a fellow Lichtenbergian melt down.