I tweaked the melody line of “Love Song,” but other than that didn’t really have time to work on the song. The state school superintendent was on campus, so all my energy for the day was spent on being her tour guide for the program.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
Another little bit (Day 320/365)
I wrestled a melody out of the rest of the first verse of “The Love Song of Thurgood J. Proudbottom.” I also finished that one line that used to go And… something something something. Now it’s And in my dreams you float above me.
The accompaniment/harmony is only sketched out. Yes, I know, if I were a real composer, it would already be there. I’m exploring new territory here, the musical show tune, and its harmonies are unfamiliar to me. No, I’m not kidding. Remember that I have no formal theory training; I have to intuit what I’m doing.
45 days to go.
A little bit (Day 319/365)
A little bit here and a little bit there.
During the morning, I taught the minuet to the string players and had a nice chat with them about why knowing this kind of thing should inform their playing. (I also dropped off the parts for Milky Way at the same time.)
In my afternoon break time, I pulled up the tango and looked over what I did yesterday. Not bad, although of course the computer cannot play the recitative in any way but straight time, so that will rely on the interpreter. I added accompaniment to the first phrase, and it was very nice.
Here’s my problem: it seems too easy. The melody for the thing just plops onto the page, which makes me suspicious. Have I already heard this somewhere? Is this somebody else’s melody that has wormed its way out of my subconscious? The accompaniment certainly does not seem familiar, but the melody flows like an old friend.
Either I’ve gotten very good at this, or I’m a plagiarist.
General productivity (Day 318/365)
I was quite productive today.
I printed the score and the parts for Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way for the GHP orchestra and chorus to look over in a couple of weeks. Actually, I printed the parts three or four times. The first time, the page setup was set for tabloid size paper, and it took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t get all those parts to print on regular paper.
Then, of course after they printed, I saw corrections I needed to make: add the part name (e.g., “Flute” or “Trumpet 1”) after the title and page number on second pages and beyond. Otherwise, of course, if the sheets got shuffled, one could not tell which page went to which part without a lot of time-consuming double-checking against the score.
Then I noticed that the combined percussion parts didn’t label the staves with the appropriate instrument, and then I realized the parts would be cleaner to read if I had Finale drop the empty staves out of the picture.
None of this sounds creative in the least, and it’s not really, but it’s donkey work in service of the overall creative effort.
However, I did actually create today as well. I pulled up the lyrics I’d dashed off last week to “The Love Song of Thurgood J. Proudbottom” and began to work on that song.
I extended the intro:
Thurgood:
My love for you is like a… what?
Alexandra:
A rose?
Thurgood:
I suppose…
Alexandra:
Or what?
Thurgood:
More often than not,
I think of you,
though my eyes are usually bleary and bloodshot,
a whole lot,
as my terminally delicious and suspiciously over-ripened
kumquat.
Now let’s gavotte.
Alexandra:
But this is a tango!
Thurgood:
Then make it a mango.
I’m especially proud of the last two lines. Then I set it and the first four lines of the verse to music. Then it was time to go to the Wind Ensemble Concert, and I had to stop for the day.
In other news, I taught the waltz to about 200 kids tonight in the first of the GHP Period Dance seminars. About half left halfway, it’s really too many people, but those who stayed had a great time. It’s always amusing how little these boys understand about dancing with a partner, and vice versa!
At any rate, we made it through the waltz, the polka, and the galop. Next week: English country dances!
Milky Way (Day 317/365)
Ah, the first Saturday of GHP, when everyone curls up into a fetal position after lunch and recovers.
After a brief recovery, and after cleaning up the apartment and putting everything away, I decided to get some work done, and I chose to work further with the way Finale 2007 deals with parts. I found that I could edit the individual parts within the program, and that’s what I worked on all afternoon.
Later, after supper, I put everything away and went up to the dance. Every Saturday night the RAs stage a dance on Langdale Circle for the mouselings. There’s a different theme each week; this week it was the Twins Dance. Dress like someone else and come together.
Many halls decide to come all alike, so it’s not much twins as clones sometime. Still, it’s a very joyous occasion. The children, like us, are exhilarated that they have survived the first week, and they’re ready to celebrate.
Some images:
- The hall that came as their RA, complete with bushy black philosophy major beard. (Even the RA was wearing a felt version of the real thing.)
- Another hall that came as their RA, with open white shirt with upturned collar, and a lavender flower tucked behind the ear.
- The RA who came as Georgia Hall, complete with little red roof hat.
- Two boys in their hall’s uniform of wife-beater and jams, who did not seem to realize or care that they danced with each other the whole time I was there.
- The group of boys (again, dressed as their über-preppy RA) in the distance, clearly dancing “in secret”: they were practicing for their entrance.
- The RA who came as a bag of M&Ms, and all her girls were the M’s.
- The song “Barbie Girl,” whereupon all the RAs on the steps of Georgia Hall turned their maglites on their dorm director, Barbie, a beautiful petite blonde, who makes no bones about her brains, her beauty, or her athleticism, and who immediately took center stage.
- The sheer exuberant immortality of youth as what was clearly a majority of the students on campus danced and jumped and sang and hugged and talked their way towards hallcheck and lights out at the end of their first week of GHP.
Last day of goofing off (Day 316/365)
No, honest, this is it. From here on out, I will have something to show for most days. Probably.
It’s the Friday of the first full week of GHP, and the faculty always celebrates in the lobby after minors. (The fact that we actually have to work Saturday morning is irrelevant.) It’s great to see everyone relaxing, snacking, talking, and in general having a great Pan-Dimensional Mouse of a time.
There was nothing on the calendar for the evening, which meant that technically after supper I should have had hours and hours to sit down in my apartment here and work on something. But you know what? Celebration of a task well-accomplished is too important to shut down.
Not only that, but for me to have come into my apartment and closed my door in order to get work done would have been seen as a serious exclusion of my happy faculty. Some would begin to worry about me, damned blues, while others would have been offended that I didn’t care to party with them.
I might have left my door open, but that’s the sign that anyone is welcome to barge in and meet/talk/play. I’m one of those people who take a good 20 minutes to get into the flow, and who among us believes that flow would happen with intermittent interruptions of happy faculty?
So I bagged it all and had a good time with my faculty. Tomorrow is another day, and I know that the happy faculty will either be going home, going to a movie, or taking long naps. I can work then, after I take my nap.
A concert (Day 315/365)
Yes, I’m behind. Yes, this is being written two days late. No, I have no excuse other than working 6:00 a.m. till midnight trying to smoothe out the little roadbumps that are inevitable when starting up this program.
On the creativity front, I at least got to attend the GHP faculty recital, a splendid affair that might have been on the long side, but at least it in the “too much of a good thing” category.
Nothing, and a lot of it (Day 314/365)
Creative product today? Minor registration day? At GHP?
It is to laugh.
My job on the first Wednesday of the Governor’s Honors Program is to sort 700 children into their first or second choice of a minor, the class in which they will spend the rest of the summer every afternoon. That’s 700 pieces of paper I must touch at least six times each: collecting, dividing into preselected and non, shuffling, sorting into first choices, counting, redeploying overages, and counting again. Repeat the last two steps until every class is within its limit and every child has his first or second choice.
And after that, I have to type in all 700 choices into the database. The whole process takes about five hours. At 9:30, I have to print out three copies of the list and take them to the dorms. I do not post them. I dump them with the RAs on duty and leave.
Then, at 10:30 pm, I have to call down students whose forms were not filled out correctly and put them in whatever class is still under its limit. And then I have to make the adjustments in the computer and print out rolls for the teacher. This year I made it to bed at midnight.
The only thing even close to being creative I did today was to attend Cinema GHP, which showed Casablanca as the first movie of the summer. Just to witness the perfection of that movie is a creative act.
Technology (Day 313/365)
You would be forgiven for expecting that I would accomplish nothing today, what with ramping up the LotPDM, but such is my foresight, my planaheaditude, that I actually had free time during the afternoon.
And so I got to an item on my TTD list: extract orchestral parts for Milky Way. Of course this is not actually difficult; Finale does it for you. But I still have not done it in a very long time (and even then I wasn’t extracting a whole orchestra).
I dimly recalled that one of the improvements to Finale 2007 was better part extraction, so I was bold and opened the piece in that version. (You may recall that I stuck to the 2006 version because the plug-in that plays the orchestra doesn’t really work in the 2007 version.) Indeed, the management of part extraction is pretty incredible.
For example, the glockenspiel plays pretty heavily, but the timpani plays once, the bass drum once, the cymbals once. Actually I had forgotten I had put the cymbals in there, because I had used the wrong note and so they weren’t playing, it’s complicated, I tell you, and I may take them out, but there they were. It seemed to me that I didn’t need to print three different parts for those instruments when clearly it would take only one bored percussionist to handle them.
Finale allows you to combine those kinds of parts into one sheet, and it was quite intuitive as to how to accomplish that.
What wasn’t intuitive, after I had exported the parts, was how to make the parts show up on 9×12 paper rather than the 11×17 of the score. I could go through each of the nineteen parts and change the size of the paper, but that goes against my rule of repeating an action more than three times without technological assistance. My presumption is that a task like that is embedded somewhere in the software. It should do it for me.
Back to Finale, looking around the Extract Parts bit. It wasn’t there, but it was in the Page Layout area. You can actually set the size of paper for the score and the parts within the score. Apparently Finale 2007 manages parts as an extension of the score, which is cool if I ever have to make changes to the score. Not that that would ever happen.
So I exported them again. Then I noticed that nowhere on the parts did it say what part it was. Shouldn’t that have been automatic? Rooting around in menus and options gave me no clue, so I was forced to resort to reading the manual. I know, but sometimes it it’s necessary.
It appears that Finale 2007 will put the part name on the part automatically, but Finale 2006 did not, so if you’ve converted a file there were extra steps to take. That’s when I found out that you can actually pull up parts within the score file and edit them before you export them. Cool!
So I exported them again.
We’ll see whether that’s good enough. What I probably need to do is to go through all the parts and move all the little bits around (pizzicato markings sitting on top of measure numbers, that kind of thing) and then export them. Again.
Nothing (Day 312/365)
As predicted, I have nothing to show for today. As the program gets under way, little things start to pop up, all those potholes or cave-ins in the road that one simply does not notice as one surveys the glorious landscape over which one is about to travel. This is not even taking into account the ambushes from hostile indigenes.
53 days to go.