Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Musings (Day 131/365)

Posted on by Dale

Minimal activity today: after I printed out the orchestral score of Milky Way on Friday, I noticed that the title was wrong. Since I had used Sun and Moon Circus as the template for my orchestrations, Milky Way still had that title, both on the first page and as headers subsequently. So today I’ve gone through to doublecheck all those files so that an incorrect title won’t be a reason for me to have to print out a score again. Didn’t take long, which leaves me time to consider other items.

For example, I’m thinking the tabloid paper (11×17) I used is not going to be big enough for a conductor’s score. The notes were tiny. However, the tabloid setting is the largest that Finale seems to handle. I guess. I haven’t installed the 2007 version yet. I have trepidations.

The good news is that last night I got an e-newsletter from Gary Garritan, he of the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds that have been giving me such trouble computer-memory-speaking-wise. He was letting us know that the German company who makes the Kontakt Player has updated that program to work with the new Intel Macs, and that he would have his stuff re-coded by the beginning of the year. This is a Huzzah, folks, because it removes any qualms I had about sinking huge dollar amounts into a new laptop. We’ll see what Apple announces in January.

Since we’re beginning to move forward in a definite way on William Blake, the need for the new laptop becomes real: I need reliable sound-making for demos and for rehearsal CDs and such. Also, orchestrating the remaining big pieces won’t be such a big hairy deal.

However, I also am going to need a big ol’ laser printer at some point to print the conductor’s score. Those are even more expensive than the laptop, and I cannot justify that expenditure at all.

In other news, I have watched two videos in the last week or so that have really inspired me. One was Uncommon Sense: the art and imagination of Nancy Willard, a short 2003 documentary of Nancy Willard’s artwork. She does these beautiful, unsettling assemblages, the people and creatures which inhabit her writing. (Yes, she has the Inn, and I’m thinking we need an exhibit of her work to accompany the premiere.)

The other video is on a DVD which includes Powers of Ten, a film by Charles & Ray Eames, the husband and wife design team. The other film on the DVD is 901: after 45 years of working. Made by the couple’s grandson, it’s a tour of the studio at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, which Ray had decided should be shut down and dispersed in the event of her death. Before this happened, the filmmaker documented the space and the materials and the work.

Both videos show what truly creative people can do given the necessary freedom. Willard does hers on a small, personal scale, while the Eames’s work was international in its scope and impact, but both involve the assemblage of disparate elements in often surreal but always striking ways.

It occurred to me that this is the environment we need to establish to work on William Blake: a studio of resources, both personal and material, that will feed the creative energies of the company. Easier said than done, of course. Both Willard and the Eames maintain huge stockpiles of stuff, the raw materials of their dreams. We have no place for that. Any storyboarding/flowcharting we do has to be stowed before we leave and put back up the next time we work. That’s going to hamper us in small but definite ways.
What we need is a storefront somewhere we can use for the next year or so to get this thing ready. Yep, that’s what we need all right.

My week in NYC (Day 130/365)

Posted on by Dale

I meant to write this last week, but was caught up in decorating duty. And actually, if I’m going to be honest, this is actually being written on Sunday, since I was on decorating duty yesterday also. But today the Empress of Decorating has gone on an excursion, and I am free to get some other stuff done. For example, after I write yesterday’s post, I will work on something for today.

This is another entry in my “With My Lottery Winnings” series, something I haven’t done in a long while. But last Friday’s Times Arts section got to me. So let’s see what I would have been doing if I had been in New York last week. We’ll just go through the two sections page by page and see what’s up.

Continue reading “My week in NYC (Day 130/365)” →

A rant (Day 129/365)

Posted on by Dale

First of all, I have to compliment my readers for resisting commentary on the phrase “My father had Speedball nibs” which was nestled in yesterday’s post. Damned mature of everyone, I must say, unless Jobie hasn’t read the post yet.

Now we’re off to a hospital holiday function, but before I go, a liberal rant:

So Mary Cheney is going to have a baby. I think that is fabulous, and I wish her and Heather the best.

This is not to say that I am not watching with raised eyebrows and pursed lips the inevitable reactions from Cheney pere’s constituency. One can really not make this stuff up.

Continue reading “A rant (Day 129/365)” →

Font Junky (Day 128/365)

Posted on by Dale

I took a break from the music today and instead went to http://www.myfonts.com to browse and see if I could find a typeface that absolutely must be the logofont for William Blake’s Inn.

I got through 50-something pages of 177, each with 24 fonts on it. I’ll do the rest today or this weekend. I love fonts. I absolutely love them. I don’t know why I’m this way, but I recognized early, like fourth or fifth grade, that I was really turned on by Old English or calligraphy. It is not a choice, it’s the way I was born.

Continue reading “Font Junky (Day 128/365)” →

Triumph! (Day 127/365)

Posted on by Dale

Done, for a ducat!

The orchestration of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way is done. Or at least the first draft is done. There are still a couple of measures that I’m sure I will revisit, but for now, it’s finished.

Here is the mp3 of the completed orchestration.

So, what next? Here are our choices:

  • 5. The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives (mp3)
  • 9. The Wise Cow Makes Way, Room, and Believe (mp3)
  • 15. Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor (mp3)

I rather think I’ll leave Marmalade Man till last, since it’s already mostly orchestrated. What does everyone else think?

Another project to work on (Day 126/365)

Posted on by Dale

I didn’t get to work on any music today, this is driving me nuts, because first I had a meeting at school with some parents, and then I had decorating duty.

The meeting at school was a good one: parents of students who are going to try the 100 Book Club project. It was informational, to answer any questions they might have about the whole thing. I’m assuming that those who didn’t come have already checked out the web page I set up for answers.

So I was working on something creative, just not THE PROJECT I NEED TO FINISH UP AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!

I have nothing scheduled for tomorrow night. Maybe I can sneak in those last six measures of Milky Way before decorating duty hits.

Humbug. (Day 125/365)

Posted on by Dale

I did not get the last six measures of Milky Way done. I did, however, get the Deer and Lava Flow™ display put up in the front yard:

Deer and Lava Flow display

But I do have a liberal rant, to wit:

The Times has an article about a memorial put up in northern California Here’s a photo.

Needless to say, people have gone nuts. One lady, whose son is at West Point and will be heading to Iraq after graduating next May, does not consider it a memorial. “The hillside is painful,” she said.

Another man called the display “a travesty” and said the people who put it up were “despicable and morally bankrupt.”

Why is it that any time anyone brings our Iraq casualties to our attention by individualizing them, the pro-war nutjobs go berserk? You would think that they would be pleased that everyone was honoring our dead, or at least they might pretend that’s what the memorializers were doing even if they weren’t.

But that’s not what happens. Every time someone reads out all the names of the dead or puts up thousands of crosses or stones or whatever, the überpatriots have a hissy. I just don’t get it. I mean, my elementary school has a big display in the front hall, with the names of all the soldiers from Coweta County who died in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Is that a “travesty”? Are we “despicable and morally bankrupt”? What if we added the names of soldiers from the first Gulf War? Or from this one?

What is the difference? I’m going out on a limb here and suggest that the pro-war nutjobs understand, even if they don’t admit it even to themselves, that our current Iraqi situation is itself “despicable and morally bankrupt,” and that calling attention to the deaths of the brave men and women who have given their lives in this debacle underlines that fact in ways that not even pro-war nutjobs can avoid. And they don’t like it. They like their country right or wrong, their wars just, and their dialectics black and white.

Thus they see every attempt to call attention to the nearly 3,000 troops who have died as an attempt to undermine the war effort, to stab their patriotism in the back and to paint the United States as a villainous imperial power. Somehow they never think that perhaps it was their patriotic duty to oppose this war in the first place, and if not in the first place, certainly by now. It should now be their patriotic duty to support our troops by making sure no more die in George W. Bush’s blunder, the worst foreign policy decision by any American President, ever. And when other people point that out to them, and to the rest of the public, they scream bloody murder. Because they understand that even if the memorial is absolutely sincere, it’s an intolerable intrusion of reality into their pony-based patriotism, and that’s what the rest of the world will see as well.

Nearly there (Day 123/365)

Posted on by Dale

Only six blank measures to go in Milky Way!

I’ve smoothed out the rat’s issues and moved into and through the final stanza, and even into the coda, which is just a repeat of mm. 68-69. Since the next two measures are just a repeat of those measures, transposed up a sixth, I should be able to finish this piece on Sunday morning.

I’ve developed this sense of completion, of being finished in some way, which is stupid, since although Milky Way is the last piece I composed (always excepting the Epilogue), I still have Marmalade Man, Make Way, and Tale of the Tailor to orchestrate. I have a long way to go before I sleep!

Still, I don’t expect any of them to have the issues that Milky Way has presented. They are pretty straightforward, without the shifting moods of this piece. They also don’t present issues of delicacy, transparency, grandeur, profundity, etc., that a walk across the night sky might.

By the way, anyone who is interested in hearing A Visit to William Blake’s Inn played through in its entirety is invited to come to the Newnan School of Dance on Wednesday, January 10, at 7:00. For full details, see the Lacuna Group.