Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Sir Christémas: last chance

Posted on by Dale

I think I’m done. I had about an hour this afternoon between getting home and having to come back to school for open house, and I just hacked out the ending. I resisted doing a flat da capo ending, but whatever I tried that was new and different just sounded lame. Finally I just gave in to centuries of tradition: end the thing the way you began it. I threw in some senseless interesting modulations every half measure just to make it sound a little different, and I think it’s done.

Last chance to kibbitz: PDF score and mp3 for your perusal. Tomorrow morning it goes in the mail.

Sir Christémas: nearly done

Posted on by Dale

So close, so close! I worked hard tonight, cutting and pasting, listening for that inner camera (how do you like them synaesthetic metaphors?) that would show me what the final piece should sound/look like.

I think I’m done except for the ending, and I know what it should be. It’s just late now and I think I’m going to deal with that tomorrow night. That way it’s still very, very shiny when I pop it in the mail on Friday morning.

If you like, here are the PDF score and the mp3. (The mp3 is pretty big, so be forewarned.)

It’s not too shabby, and it’s actually fun to sing. I can hear a lot of subtleties that the computer is just not getting but that a chorus and celestist would, like in the third verse, which should be as gentle as possible and probably slower than I have it marked.

There are a lot of blank measures at the end, so a lot of dead air at the end of the mp3. I’m not fixing it tonight.

Sir Christémas, et al.

Posted on by Dale

It’s early Sunday morning, and I’ve been slogging away at Sir Christémas, always mindful that it’s got to be in the mail on Friday. I’m in that phase where it’s just dreck. I’ve posited a “Sing Nowell” interlude between the verses, but right now it’s just clunky and bad. I hate this.

Part of the problem, of course, is that I have no clear idea of the piece in my head. I couldn’t transcribe it even if I were capable of such a thing, because it’s not there. I’m just machete-ing my way through the randomness of the universe, hoping to hack out a path that makes sense. Right now it doesn’t.

In other news, it’s time to release Grayson into the wild again. Last year, you may recall, it was quite traumatic as we took him up to Guilford and left him. For us, of course; he was quite pleased with his new habitat and missed only his cat.

I’m a little better this time. I’m not freaking over what I will do without him. This year, all my angst is over whether or not he can survive auf Deutsch, since after lunch we’ll drive to Hartsfield-Jackson International and put him on a plane to Munich. For the semester. Ach du lieber. Ich beunruhige mich daß er hat der Sprache zur Genüge nicht gelernt.

I’ve given him a map of Hofvonstein and asked that if he can he go to our capital of Waldkirchen and take a couple of pictures. I’d love some pictures of Löwenhof (which the Austrians apparently call Bad Leonfeld), but I think it probably looked better when Karl Magnus was alive.

Sir Christémas: first verse

Posted on by Dale

Continuing my organic exploration of the text of my selected carol, “Sir Christémas,” I have arrived at the end of the first stanza. I think.

I decided that the opening, though delightful, had about reached the limit of human tolerance for tinkly triplets. Dotted quarters, offset with syncopated figures in the bass, were called for, I thought. That led naturally into a slow setting of the first line of the first verse, “I am here, Sir Christ(é)mas,” followed by quiet little “trumpet calls” on the next line, “Welcome, my lord, Sir Christ(é)mas!” Not bad at all.

Actually, I had blocked out the melody in the basses of the first line last night, but when I listened to it tonight it sounded like a natural extension, a response, to the intro, and it needed to sound like an opening of a stanza so that when I repeated it, the audience would recognize it as a signpost, as it were. I changed it to more strong sound.

I double-checked the next three verses to see if my structure could be applied to the first two lines of those and still make musicosyntactical sense. I think it can. With a moderate amount of force.

The last line of the trio I thought needed something a little crescendo-y, so I took that ascending chromatic line at the end of the intro and used that. I’m not sure about it, but it’s a place holder at least.

My plan at this point is break into a pointillistic “Nowel, Nowel!” after each verse, modifying each with different chromatic lenses and with different coloristic strategies in the celesta. Wow, that actually sounds like I know what I’m talking about. Wait, I do know what I’m talking about. Wow, that actually sounds like I could intentionally effect that about which I know I’m talking. Or something.

::sigh:: Just listen.

Sir Christémas: a little more

Posted on by Dale

I’ve hammered out the rest of the little prologue: “Who is there who singeth so, Nowel?” That’s not as involved as it sounds, since it’s only two more measures. Still, in a very organic kind of way, I’m letting the music evolve. I have that tinkling opening motive and the descending thirds of the chorus to play with now, so that’s something, and I’ve added an upward run through all kinds of chromaticism.

Next, like tomorrow night, I have to work on a body for the thing: what are the outlines of the verse? It’s got to be solid enough to bear repeating for the four verses, and I’d like it to be recognizable, i.e., so that if I interpolate the “Nowel” sequence in between, the audience will hear it anew when it returns. Sounds like I’m working towards a rondo form here.

I found an NPR broadcast of the 2003 winners. Very pretty, and very typically “choral,” with all kinds of mellow blendings and suspensions. I’m sure we’ll hear similar kinds of things this year. I’m betting lots of starry music, and lots of lullabyes, so maybe mine will stand out as all kinds of different.

Sir Christémas: so far, so good

Posted on by Dale

I had pulled together several texts last night which I found on The Hymns and Carols of Christmas, a pretty exhaustive site.

If you’d like to second guess me (other than the hundreds I didn’t even look at), here’s a list:

I really liked the Yule Days one, a kind of out-of-left-field version of “Twelve Days of Christmas.” (Thank you, Scotland.) But the accompaniment for this year’s competition is, as I mentioned yesterday, a celesta, very dainty and very quiet. I’ll set “Yule Days” for a more raucous accompaniment.

So which one did I pick? “Sir Christmas,” which is a little odd, since I think the text also suggests a more raucous setting. I know that we did one at Newnan Presbyterian that was a whole lot of fun and very hard on the choir and organist both.

Still, I’ve made a good start. I began by opening “Ginny’s Valentine,” a piece I did for Ginny one year when I forgot to do anything else, and assigning the celesta to it. Limited range, the celesta, especially in the Garritan Personal Orchestra version. I guess they only did the four-octave instrument, because it doesn’t have the range indicated by Anatomy of the Orchestra. The SoftSynth version, of course, has no range limits at all, since it’s synthesized and not sampled like the GPO. Also, if you will recall, SoftSynth has choral sounds while GPO does not, although the new Finale, arriving next week, is supposed to include new GPO choral sounds.

After I played around with getting a feel for the instrument, I opened up a new piece and just began playing with notes.

And here’s the first six measures for you to listen to. Just playing, and a long way to go with a non-metrical text, especially in a week and a half, but a good start.

Some random thoughts

Posted on by Dale

My plan is to begin working on music in a fairly serious manner tomorrow night; it will be the start of my fall push. You may remember how I have realized that I work better with a schedule, so I’m devoting Sunday mornings and Tuesday and Wednesday nights to composing.

What will I be working on? I got email today reminding me that the deadline for the Welcome Christmas Carol Competition is next Friday, so I think I’ll see if I can knock something out for that. I should do some work on A Day in the Moonlight, but Mike’s in Africa for a while, so it’s not as if he can check up on me.

The challenge this year is to set a carol for SATB chorus and a five-octave celesta, which apparently is a big deal. (Del Mar’s Anatomy of the Orchestra says that four octaves is in fact the norm.) This is the instrument that plays (and indeed was first heard) in “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Nutcracker. It’s a very quiet instrument, played like a piano, unable to be heard above much of a mezzopiano.

Again, as I mentioned I think in May, finding the text is the hard thing. Maybe after I finish musing this post.

Last week, Diane Mize, my painting instructor from GHP so long ago (we have a mutual pact not to mention that number of years ever again), sent me an email from one of her favorite creative bloggers, Robert Genn, a painter. Like me, he recognizes that there are particular times of the day when he’s most apt to work spontaneously, but recently he came across an idea he shared in his biweekly letter (explained and subscribable here.)

The idea is to perform one more creative act before turning out the lights. Tiredness contributes in a way one does not expect. Casualness and the feeling of “something extra” make their mark. A lackadaisical twenty-minute afterthought becomes a creative bonus.

He talks about it being a way to use up extra paint, in his case. I’m wondering how I might do this. My creative times are in the evening anyway. I work best when I have specific times set aside, and I usually quit precisely at 9:00 unless I’m really burning through material. So an hour later, would there be “something extra,” or would it be just thoughts based on what I’ve already done? Again, I’d benefit more if I were able to jot down things I heard in my head in any kind of accurate way.

Genn makes it sound as if one is to return to one’s workspace, but “before turning out the lights” implies bedtime to me, especially since I work nearly up until that time anyway. Perhaps I could have some kind of bed-journal. This keeps sounding like yet another Moleskine notebook. Ah, well, if I must…

Yesterday, we went to the High Museum to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by an exhibit like this, not just through the sheer volume of great stuff that you have to assimilate before your legs give out, but also of the sheer greatness of the mind you are encountering.

Leibovitz was an enormous force in photography. Her celebrity portraits were witty without being gimmicky, and were often sumptuous. Her photodocumentary works were stark and powerful. Her “informal” photos, of family and such, were as carefully selected as her other work.

Much of her work stays with you, indeed, much of the exhibit one would have seen before when it was first published, but the portrait of Daniel Day Lewis especially intrigued me. Having such a handsome subject always helps, I’m sure, but I keep remembering the richness of his attire, the layers, the vest, the shirt, possibly a scarf or cravat, the greatcoat, all dark-colored and tumbling about him. He sat in near profile to us, his legs crossed elegantly away from us, and looking out from the dark background. It was somewhere between a dark Renaissance portrait and a Regency rake.

Of course, it is very hard not to regard the output of such a great mind as this as a rebuke, or at the very least, a challenge in several ways.

First, it seems to challenge you to respond to the art, to the mind; to know, to appreciate, to understand what the artist has accomplished and to embrace it, not only the polished result of a lifetime of seeing and doing, but the struggle of that seeing and doing in the result you see before you.

After looking at Daniel Day Lewis for some time, do I know him better? Of course not; that’s a fallacy of Vanity Fair readers everywhere. But I do know Annie Leibovitz better. I see her ability to see Lewis in terms that will reveal him to the viewers of this portrait. Despite her claim elsewhere in the exhibit not to be able to produce decent work in a studio, the Lewis portrait is a masterwork of sensuality and chiaoscuro.

This great work is of course a challenge to one’s own meagre doodlings. It’s a challenge to produce, to meet Leibovitz on her own terms, to explore and push your boundaries as she pushed hers, failure is not an option, even it it seems clear that it really is the only option. You want to play as well as she has.

::sigh::

Day 365

Posted on by Dale

Well, here we are. The end of the experiment. Was I able to be creative every single day for an entire year?

Short answer: of course not, if by creative we mean “producing something new.” Many was the day I had no time, nor the energy, nor the ideas even to commit failure to paper. I knew that going in, needless to say.

At one point in the year I know I expressed envy of those on the web who were doing similar kinds of projects, producing a drawing or watercolor or small oil or photograph every day. I don’t know that I would have overcome my reasons for not producing every day if I had been producing a concrete thing rather than music (my focus for the most part), but it seemed to me at the time that they had an advantage over me. (So why didn’t I just whip out a watercolor those days?)

Would I able to claim that I was creative every day if we don’t mean “producing something new”? Perhaps. As I read Out of Our Minds and skimmed back through some other books like Fearless Creating and Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit, I was reminded of what I already knew going in, that creativity is not production. It is a process that must include plenty of incubation as well as consumption of material. However, I think I claimed those days.

Mostly what I have found is that I do best when I’m a) on a schedule; and b) on a deadline. If I set aside Sunday mornings and then two evenings a week to compose, then I actually do compose, or at least fail at it. And the days in between, I am thinking about the stuff I’m working on.

The schedule also means I have the time to get in the groove. It takes me about twenty minutes to warm up, so to speak, and to get ideas flowing out of my head. At least that’s the case with composing. Writing, I can do on the fly (witness my dog-walking lyrics) if I’ve set myself a framework. I can spew some music while walking, but it’s all guesswork, since I have not yet achieved my goal of being able to transcribe what’s in my head.

Having learned all of this, I think I’m able now to set up the conditions under which I will be most productive. I may be able to, in the future, modify those conditions, but for now, I know what works for me.

So what did I accomplish this year?

First and foremost, of course, was the completion of William Blake’s Inn. A project that has occupied me off and on for twenty-five years, I was on the last leg of the journey when I started this project: finishing Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. It took me over a month to do that.

Next it was orchestrating the entire work. (I think I may have started orchestrating some of the pieces in order to distract from Milky Way.) This project is not quite finished, of course. I have not yet officially orchestrated The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives and Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor. They’re quasi-scored using various instrumental sounds in the piano score, but I don’t have actual orchestral scores for them yet. Unless someone in Newnan, GA, steps up to organize the production, my widget says we have 447 days until opening night, those two items will remain on the back burner.

At the same time, I started the “Highway 341” poem. I used that as a fallback item on days when I didn’t/couldn’t compose, but I haven’t worked on it since shortly before finishing Milky Way. I guess at that point the Inn took over. Well, it’s still a pretty good start, and I can return to it in the coming year. I would have to go back and do some deep thinking, of course, because I’ve gotten it to a point where I would actually have to start writing about the feelings that inspired it to begin with. And those were never very clear.

I also began, last August, noodling around on my symphony. Needless to say, I haven’t given that any thought since September either, but that is going to be my major project this fall and winter: Stephen Czarkowski has asked for it for next summer’s orchestra. Not exactly a commission, but hey, a request is as good as, right?

Also accomplished this year: Lacuna’s workshopping of the William Blake pieces. Very nice, lots of fun, and very very creative. I like working this way. I don’t like working without a permanent home: my van looked like one of those crazy people with all their prized possessions stacked inside. For months. But the give and take of the workshop sessions was invigorating. If the world premiere gets a green light, then I truly look forward to developing the entire scenario in this way.

I learned how to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on websites, and that has been a very good thing.

I adumbrated and fleshed out the 100 Book Club at school. By the end of the year, we were up and running, but not at full speed. I’m looking forward to figuring out how to ramp that up this year. If it works, I will truly have something amazing to share with the educational community: a reading program that challenges our best readers to read thoughtfully and deeply and then to write about their experience.

I wrote The Invocation, which still stands up as valid. In a similar vein, we established the phase successive approximation as our mantra.

I began work on songs for A Day in the Moonlight, sketching out three so far. Once I get school started and am able to establish a schedule for myself, I could finish that by Christmas. Warning: I’m not orchestrating this baby. I’m just providing vocal/piano scores.

I rediscovered my Stars on Snow album of new age music and began to play with some of those files in Logic Express, Apple’s sound sequencer, which I began to learn how to use this summer.

I got inspired and wrote “Dance for double bass duo and marimba” which not only was greeted warmly by everyone concerned but which was premiered at the final GHP concert. I have a recording, but they were playing from the back of Whitehead Auditorium. I’m going to play around with it in Logic and see if I can beef it up a bit.

As a sidelight of “Dance” and the readthrough of Milky Way, I found myself suddenly in demand as a composer. Other than the Symphony, I have two requests for pieces. One of them is a serious request and I’ll work on it this fall. This is a very strange place for me to be in. I’m still sorting through that.

And I made a mug.

Something else got accomplished this year: a very small community of very smart readers helped me out. I’ve been checking out the posts, it’s taking me a very long time to write this, and I come across posts like this one. The post itself is very good, I think, but it’s the comments that blow me away: literate, thoughtful, witty. I like writing for you guys.

Next? I will finish the songs for Day in the Moonlight, and I will write my Symphony No. 1 in G major. That’s enough to be going on with. Of course, if a project coordinator materializes for William Blake’s Inn, then I’ll be back at work on that.

Will I keep blogging? I’m sure I will, although I may not blog every day. We’ll see. Don’t expect anything for a few days, anyway. My study is still unclean from GHP.

Checking back, I noticed that I started this project on August 1. Shouldn’t I have finished on July 31? How did I lose four days? Oh well. I knew that was bound to happen as well.

Day 364

Posted on by Dale

One day to go, but before we get serious, a response to yesterday’s post on copyright and the flux of the Commons, from Jeffrey R. (for “Raline,” we think) Bishop: listen to this. Some of us have way too much time on our hands. As I said yesterday, I’m thrilled that the planet is mashing up William Blake’s Inn. However, if he starts getting rich off of it, I’m going to sue his ass off for an unauthorized derivative work.

Tonight, Kevin McInturff called to chat about a couple of things, but one thing he asked me in particular: do I think that having blogged about my 365 days of creativity has made me more creative?

Yes, I do, actually. It made me more conscious of wasting time, and even though there were plenty of days tagged “not” (39 to be precise, 11% of the year), usually those were days when real life simply left me no time to do any work. The days I actually goofed off were pretty few.

Though my audience was small, you guys were an audience. I was highly aware that you read what I wrote and followed my ups and downs, and that made me determined at least to write every day, whether I had accomplished anything or not. Kevin suggests that those days were often more interesting than the ones where I gloated about my triumphs.

Will I continue doing this? Let’s see tomorrow.

Further musings on copyright (Day 363/365)

Posted on by Dale

It did not work out for me to produce original stuff today, but this article in the New York Times caught my eye. In it, the Chinese are having a riproaring good time with Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling’s subcreation is a huge hit even in the Middle Kingdom, and there, copyright doesn’t mean what it means here. Mostly, it means nothing.

Quick sidenote: today was the first day back to work at Newnan Crossing, and one of the boxes waiting for me was the box from Bound-to-Stay-Bound containing our two copies of Deathly Hallows. As I pulled the books from the box, I noticed an orange slip of paper in each. They were my warning notice to keep them secure and not to display them or show them to anybody before 12:01 am, July 21. In other words, if I had been there to open the box when it came in, I would have had copies of the final book before any of the rest of you. Behold the power of the librarians! Bwahahaha!

Anyway, copyright in China. In China, you can buy Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from their equivalent of Scott’s Bookstore or Barnes & Noble. You can also buy it on the street, photocopied and bound, for a lot less. But you can also buy Harry Potter and the Showdown, by Li Jingsheng, a textile factory manager who had bought the first six books to read to his son, and in response to his son’s wanting to know how it ended, wrote his own, 250,000 words worth.

Mr. Li made the mistake of posting his version on the intertubes, where it quickly logged 150,000 readers, and now you can buy it on the street. Not that Mr. Li is making money off it: Chinese pirates will rip off anyone, not just billionaire Scottish authoresses. (Mr. Li’s readers have begged him for book eight, which he has already begun, unlike the ungrateful Ms. Rowling.)

But you can also buy (and I’m getting to a point soon, I promise) Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon, Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire, Harry Potter and the Young Heroes, Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon, and Harry Potter and the Big Funnel. I’m not too sure about that last one.

Rowling’s publishers have of course taken steps to quash all this, but I’m sure once you get over into the Qinghai province, you don’t have much of a presence as a Western litigator.

So here’s the deal: wow. A fifth of the world’s population is so taken with your creation that they have an entire black market economy based on it. Wow. They’re writing their own, melding it with their own culture. It cannot be suppressed, and their government’s pretty darn good at suppression.

Copyright, as we’ve said before, was put into place to protect a creator’s work for a limited time so that he/she can make money from its sale before it gets subsumed by the Commons. But it does get subsumed by the Commons, precisely so that the rest of us can use it to spur our own creations, be it Harry Potter and the Big Funnel or The Winter’s Tale (yes, I’m looking at you, Mark Helprin.)

Now, when Joanne Rowling was a starving artist with a wee bairn, then absolutely Bloomsbury and Scholastic should have guarded her interests with as much ferocity as the law allows. And yes, I know that legally nothing is different now that she’s the world’s first billionaire author. But you know what? It is different. Copyright was designed to allow her some space to get income off her creation if she could, and I think, by any standard, she’s done that. She can’t even give it all away in her lifetime, and it’s not as if the end of the series is the end of her income. She is, to put it mildly, filthy rich.

I also think she’s done more than amass an unimaginable fortune from her copyright: she has given the world a huge gift to their narrative pool. Enormous. Stupendous. Unequalled in the 20th/21st century, even. Harry Potter burst the bounds of normal copyright considerations years ago, look at all the fanfic online, the slash fiction, the YouTube parodies, and now an entire Chinese industry. A completely alien culture has taken her work and run with it, churning the narrative pool in what I think is a very exciting way. If I had made a fortune off of William Blake’s Inn, I’d be thrilled to see the entire planet riffing on my stuff. Shoot, even if I hadn’t made a fortune, I’d be thrilled.

So while I support the lawyers in their quest to shut down the fake Deathly Hallows sales or the books that purport to be actually by J. K. Rowling, that’s a direct violation of the ethos of copyright, I am not so supportive of any efforts to suppress the rest of it. If I were Rowling, I’d instruct my lawyers to go collect all of it. I’d want my personal copy of The Big Funnel. Translated, of course.