Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Things to do (Day 341/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tired of getting nothing done, and yet not up to the sustained effort required to write music or lyrics, I headed over to my super-secret website, Things to Do Before You’re 60, and made a concerted effort towards my goal of contributing 25 items to the list this summer.

I wrote ten, which is pretty good. I do wonder about Mike, the coworker from Newnan Crossing who talked me into this. Where has he been all summer? He probably lost the URL or his password. I should email him.

Oh, you want a list?

  • Travel to another country
  • Keep a journal
  • Give someone a surprise party
  • Develop an expertise
  • See Casablanca
  • Be alone
  • Read children’s books
  • Learn some constellations
  • Streak
  • Read a great classic
  • Write a thank you note

This is not as easy as it looks.

Here’s something else that’s not as easy as it looks: writing 100 facts about yourself. Try it. I have started a list, somewhere on my computer, and even including things which I would never tell anyone else, I’m only up to 73.

24 days to go.

Nothing, really (Day 340)

Posted on by Dale

We’re getting into that phase of the program when my duties start to pile up. Just like at the opening, my “free time” is spent getting paperwork done and the stars aligned for an easy exit for everyone.

I have noticed something, as I’ve walked around campus. Often I will be struck by a very real sense of unreality, that is, somehow I’ve fallen into an alternate reality. Very PDM.

This is not to be confused with a dream state. It doesn’t feel as if I’m dreaming. It feels as if I’m walking down the street in Newnan, perhaps, or down my hall at home, and yet everything around me is this other place. Perhaps I should say it feels as if I should be walking down the street in Newnan, and yet here I am.

This is curious in so many ways. For one thing, other than my family and my kitchen, what is there in Newnan that have even half the allure of this campus during the summer? What would I be walking down the street in Newnan toward?

As I often do at times of transition, I check my computer calendar for what’s coming up next, mapping out the next few months. Library training, preplanning, school opens… and then nothing. My calendar is absolutely blank after August.

Yes, I know, it will fill up pretty quickly, with Masterworks, social occasions, perhaps even Lacuna getting back to work on William Blake if someone steps up to head the organizing committee, but in general one can appreciate why being yanked out of this alternate reality back into the regular time/space continuum can be a bit of a drag.

Piddling (Day 339/365)

Posted on by Dale

For some reason my brain would not engage today. For once I had gotten plenty of sleep, but nothing would make my head start working. I listened to the two songs from Moonlight a couple of times, but nothing new occurred to me. I thought about getting through another handful of pages in the Logic Express book, I’m only on page 141 out of nearly 600, but even just following instructions was too much.

Finally I decided to open up the lyrics for Moonlight and see if anything happened there. Nothing did, exactly, but I decided while I was in there I’d go ahead and create pages for each song.

I’ve been using a little program called CopyWrite to work on the lyrics. Why not just a word processor? I don’t know. This popped up at some point in my life, and its quasi-notebook approach seemed a good place to work. It allows me to scratch out lyrics in the writing window, and keep notes about the song in a little “drawer” out to the side, and since it’s a notebook, I have all the songs at my fingertips. It also allows writers to tag pages with things like “chapter,” “draft,” “character,” etc.

However, it has some shortcomings that have begun to bug me. For example, its text formatting is very limited, with no strikethrough, which is very odd for a project manager, I think. Changing the name of a page, from “Harrison’s song” to “Sheer Poetry,” for example, was a matter of right-clicking instead of just hitting enter like it is everywhere else in the Mac world. Lots of other little things as well.

The last straw was when I went to create a page for “We’ll Run Away” and it wouldn’t allow an apostrophe in the page title. That’s just stupid. CopyWrite saves all your pages as separate files in a project folder it creates, and Finder naming conventions do not prohibit apostrophes, so why was CopyWrite balking?

Online I go to look once again at Circus Ponies’ Notebook. I’ve been eyeing this program for a while, but every time I download it, I think that I really don’t need it. But now I think perhaps I do. I look at all the screenshots, I watch the rather long video tour, and I am impressed.

Just to make sure, I head over to MacLife’s website and double-check for all the similar programs. I’ve looked at most of them over the years, and none of them have ever gotten me excited enough to download them, and Notebook seems to have the edge. So I download it for at least a 30 day trial.

(It also occurs to me that Grayson might find the voice annotation function useful. I know if I were sitting in a political science class being conducted in German, I’d like to be able to take notes while recording the lecture for later listening, on a Cornell note-taking page, no less.)

So I spend most of my morning transferring the pitifully few lyrics I have from CopyWrite over to Notebook, and then tracking down my post where I list all the songs and transferring that information over.

Notebook doesn’t have a little drawer for notes on a page, but I decided to create a separate “divider” for the notes on the songs, then link them back and forth.

I can also drag the Finale files into the Notebook to link each song to its score. For “Sheer Poetry,” for example, I could drag a couple of poetry websites onto the page for quick reference.

All in all, not a bad decision.

In other news, the All-Campus Chorus concert was this afternoon. Vivaldi’s Gloria went off without a hitch, and then the orchestra played Smetana’s The Moldau and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, both of them fabulously. The Moldau especially is just a beautiful piece, a work of genius undimmed by its lush popularity.

And finally, tonight I taught my last Period Dance lesson for the summer, the “ragtime” dances: tango, foxtrot, Castle Walk. The kids have had a great time, and it’s been fun watching the regulars get into it. What’s really neat about the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice is how hard the kids will work to have fun. My heart is always especially warmed by the number of boys who show up every week to learn these dances. Next Sunday, the Grand Ball!

Chorus (Day 338/365)

Posted on by Dale

My free time today was devoted to rehearsing with the All-Campus Chorus. This year, we’re doing Vivaldi’s Gloria. Yes, I know, nothing particularly challenging about it, and I have raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips at its selection. When Stephen bragged about how well the runthrough with the music minors had gone, I reminded him that we can all do it with our eyes closed.

Still, it’s a very pretty piece and singing it with a full orchestra is always fun. Thank goodness our oboist this time is wonderful. Somehow it’s the oboist who in the past has just lain down and deflated, but Jordan Dale seems to have what it takes to thrill us. It should be a good concert.

Quick work (Day 337/365)

Posted on by Dale

It dawned on me that I had better print out the music I do have, if Marc and his mouselings are going to use it, so I went to do that. It was then I discovered that I hadn’t finished harmonizing Thurgood’s tango.

So I just squeezed out some chords, and I’m not sure whether they’re interesting or just wrong. Oh well, for the mouselings’ purpose, it will serve.

Sheer poetry (Day 335/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today I was forced to work.

But first, this report: I was in the Fine Arts building today, looking for Stephen Czarkowski to ask when would be a good time to meet with the bass players to get some feedback on the “Dance.” As it happened, right then. I got dragged into a practice room where Jack and Alex and I talked through the piece. I was able to point out some things about it they hadn’t noticed yet (7/8 is actually 3+2+2/8, a lopsided 3/4) and we worked through it.

Then we talked about their instruments and what they could and could not do. They can actually do a lot more than one might think. Why the heck do we not provide them with pieces written for their strengths?

This evening, I chatted with Ryan Smith, the percussion teacher. The irony is that while my writing for the bassists is apparently spot on, my writing for the marimba leaves something to be desired. I knew the virtuosic spot near the end might be problematic, heading as it does directly into three-note chords, but hey, I figured the marimbist might actually enjoy the challenge. And there is one passage where I have a double-octave thing going on that was really just a mistake in dragging and dropping that I forgot to fix. But otherwise, I think it’s within bounds. I’m curious as to what Ryan has to tell me.

So anyway, yesterday Marc emailed me to suggest that if I had any scraps of Day in the Moonlight tunes lying around, they (the theatre majors) could use them as interlude bits in their performance.

Well, all I had was Thurgood’s tango, but I figured I could mess around with a couple of melodies and at least come up with fragments the kids could play with. I thought I’d start with “Sheer Poetry,” the boy Garrison’s song to his true love Elizabeth. His goal is to become a poet, something that his father (Thurgood) disapproves of. When she presses him to read her some of his stuff, which he has resisted doing, he sings to her:

Intro

Who knows what a metaphor
is for?
What makes hyperbole
so free?
Or an anapest
the best?
I do.
It’s no bet or trick
that my rhetoric
or poesy
that you notice, see?,
Because it all comes from you.

——
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Let me count the ways.
Rise up, my love, my dear, and come away,
We’ll find a fine and private place
Where none I think but us embrace
On a summer’s day.

And so on and so forth. The chorus is:

It may sound queer,
but it’s true, my dear
my love for you is sheer
poetry.

Not only did I finish that first verse, but I wrote the music for it. No intro yet, and no chorus, but still, at least I accomplished something.

30 days to go.

More Logic (Day 334/365)

Posted on by Dale

Really minimal today. I ran through the next lesson on Logic, learning more about getting sound files into a “song project,” but didn’t really get anything done. The program is getting more and more complicated by the page. When I left off, I was supposed to be assimilating the methods by which you can assign key commands to all those endless menus and windows.

In other news, the vocal majors and jazz majors had their concert tonight. The vocal majors, led by David Reimschussel, were phenomenal. A smart, sophisticated program, perfectly performed. The jazz majors, led by David Springfield, are still learning, I think, except for one Chris Cassino, who was a marvel: tenor and soprano sax, and flute, and quite felicitous on all three. Add to that the fact that he’s tall, athletic, and quite good-looking, and you’ve got a total package. If he’s interested in a career in jazz at all, I imagine we’ll be adding his name to the Wikipedia article on famous GHP alums.

Before the concert, one of the double bass players came up to me and thanked me for the piece I wrote for them. Quite flattering, and he seemed to be genuinely pleased with the music. I want to try to get together with them and talk about their instruments, get a better idea of what sounds good on the instrument, what might be interesting to try, and what is clearly impossible.

Small things (Day 333/365)

Posted on by Dale

After breathlessly knocking out “Dance” in one day, a view that ignores the thinking and the two days of false starts, I didn’t get anything committed to paper today.

I did get a poster for the All-Campus Chorus done for next weekend. Those have to go out today or tomorrow.

Otherwise, it was a quieter day. I have had a request for a piece for piano, saxophone, and trombone, of all things, and I’ve been mulling solutions over in my head. I haven’t come up with anything, or rather, I’ve mulled over different attacks on the problem and haven’t decided which one to take.

One idea I’ve had is to open with the piano just arpeggiating all over the place. Never one to to reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to, I popped over to the library to see if I could find a score to Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto and just steal that passage (or at least see how it’s done.)

They didn’t have that score, but as I was wandering the M stacks, I passed through the section of books about specific instruments, and lo, there was A new history of the double bass, by Paul Brun. Had to have it.

It’s actually very wittily written. How can you not love a book whose author, after quoting Weber on the necessity of simplifying cello parts for the basses, footnotes it with “Weber apparently omitted to mention the useful little ruse of feigning a coughing fit so as to produce a diversion during a difficult passage!”? Or whose section headings include things like “An Instrument that does not inspire Trust” or “A Fisticuffs Lesson”? or has a recurring section heading called “The German Exception”?

At any rate, I know a little more about the instrument now than I did when I wrote my first piece for it. Yesterday. I’d know a lot more if I actually read the whole thing.

(FYI, I handed the piece over to Stephen, and good soul that he is, he immediately turned it over to the bassists. I haven’t heard any reviews yet.)

Done with Dance (Day 332/365

Posted on by Dale

You will scarcely credit this, but I wrote “Dance for Double Bass Duo and Marimba” today.

I ditched the temple blocks; they just weren’t working. But I knew I wanted some kind of percussion going on that would provide the rhythmic fleetness that the basses just can’t do, poor things. Finally I fell back on my friend the marimba.

Now the challenge was to integrate, if not subordinate, the marimba, which if I didn’t deliberately hold back would take over the piece; it would become a marimba solo with growly accompaniment back there somewhere. This I did by keeping it (at least at first) in its lower registers and playing a rhythmic motif that is clearly accompanying the basses and not vice versa.

I don’t think I mentioned one of the piece’s salient points: it’s in 7/8 time. Tricky, but savage. The piece is marked “dangerously,” and that’s what I want the bass players to do, to push it towards violence.

Harmonically, it’s in the Phrygian mode: start on an E and play a scale using only white notes. Dangerous sounding, you see. It shifts about a bit, but it’s mostly pretty minimalist in nature. About halfway through, it breaks out into C major, and it’s this portion that probably will trivialize it. It’s too pretty, too much sunshine and hope in such a moody piece. Plus, happy music cannot be serious music, you know, not since the twelve-toners and the atonalists hijacked concert music 80 years ago.

Too bad. It’s perfectly serviceable gebrauchsmusik. Well, unless it can’t actually be played by bassists. I’ll spring it on Stephen tomorrow and find out.