Creating something every day for 365 days
I’m not sure I’m through with this one. This is 7. The Wise Cow Enjoys a Cloud. It was one of my earlier “experimental” pieces, the experiment being that I wanted to see if I could do away with that iambic beat in the music, just erase the barlines, as it were.
As it happens, I literally erased the barlines in the piano score. What I’m still not sure about is whether I’ve gotten the delicacy I need in the scoring.
11. When We Come Home, Blake Calls for Fire is the first of the William Blake’s Inn poems that I ever set to music, in 1983, if I recall correctly. It’s remained one of my favorites, so I began to worry that it would not fit any more: it comes right after 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way, the last one I composed. Twenty-something years of composition separate them, and their styles might seem glaringly dissimilar.
Not to worry. As I orchestrated it this morning, it came alive all over again. I remain proud and a little thrilled. Here are the score and mp3. The mp3 is a little messed up in the forte section: my laptop’s age and lack of memory and speed make for some glitches in the recording process. They’re small, however, so though you may notice them, I think you will have no problem being swept away.
I fiddled more with CSS, this time on a site for school. I’m working on a project called The 100 Book Club, wherein gifted readers abandon Accelerated Reader and are called upon to read more challenging books, and to read more reflectively. Somehow, between 2nd and 5th grade, they must read 100 books, selected from a list of more than 500. For each book, they write a short blog post in a personal, behind-the-firewall blog (sample here), part of a reading blog community. Could be very exciting.
Anyway, I slaved away getting together this list of books, and I needed a way to share it with my faculty and get their input. I came up with this page, which lists all the books.
The creative part came in getting the CSS to work. Notice how the explanatory material on the left does not scroll down. Pretty cool, huh?
The very nice thing about CSS is that if I decide I need to make the authors’ names smaller, or change the color of the line above their name, I can do that in the stylesheet, and the whole page changes. You can imagine how useful this would be in revamping an entire site.
It’s how one can change the look of one’s own blog, by the way. All the “themes” are simply different stylesheets.
I didn’t think I’d get anything done today, since Thursday is not normally a working night for me, and since my father-in-law is in town for a visit (and the Shubian’s Rift premiere Saturday night), but I had some time to work, so I skipped ahead to 8. Two Sunflowers Move Into the Yellow Room.
Again, this is a bit of a cheat, since when I more or less scored it when I wrote it. Still, transferring it to GPO sounds and deciding exactly which instruments to assign where was not nothing.
Tonight’s puzzle: see if you can tell what my own questions are about how I’ve scored this. I have some, so it’s a fair question. Herewith, the piano score and the mp3 of Sunflowers.
For staging purposes, I think it’s too short, but it would be perfectly easy to insert a dance sequence between the two verses. It’s one of the loveliest pieces in the whole work, so it would be nice to hear the melody a couple of more times.
In other news, you probably need to head over to http://www.nanowrimo.org/. I mean, after all, it’s not as if it’s 365 days of commitment, you know. I’d do it, but I’m busy.
Another day of not a lot: I continued to play with CSS, working on a webpage for my new 100 Book Club at school, and I designed a really nifty invitation for a get-together we’re having for parents of Grayson’s friends, now that they’ve had a chance to adjust to the children being away. The outside has a photo of some street punks: “It’s 10:00. Do you know where your child is?” And inside it says, “Us either. Join us for cocktails and complain about it.”
Otherwise, I cleaned house for the arrival of my father-in-law. His 75th birthday is Sunday, so he’s coming here and I get to cook. Also, it’s the premiere of Shubian’s Rift on Saturday. Who could miss that?
Once again, I was prepared to tackle “Sun & Moon Circus,” but a late supper and other business kept me away from the computer.
I do want to say, though, that the Republican leadership’s outrage over the politicization of Rep. Mark Foley’s boy-sex scandal is raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips. How many tax dollars did these same guys spend on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? “It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.” Said Mark Foley at the time.
And someone, don’t have the reference, sorry, today made the claim that one reason the Republican leadership tippytoed around the problem of a sexual predator in their midst was that they knew he was gay and they were afraid of being politically incorrect. Ah, yes, the right wing of our Congress is readily recognized by their sensitivity towards our gay citizens.
Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge both blame the boys: “sexual beasts,” which sounds to me as if they’ve given a little too much thought about this kind of thing. Dennis Hastert wonders why no one’s investigating the 16-year-olds.
James Dobson blames the internet and our permissive society, which is quite Christian of him, for him. I’m sure he’d do the same for Rep. Barney Frank.
Rep. Tom Reynolds, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (to elect more people like this), rented a daycare facility, children and all, to hold a press conference today. When a reporter asked if they could get the little kids out of there so they could have an adult discussion of the Foley scandal, including what Reynolds knew and when he knew it, Reynolds declined. “I’m not going to ask any of my supporters to leave.” Who were these children? “…some of our thirty-somethings, I’ve watched these children being born…” Only not, of course.
All in all, a queasily satisfying display of conservative meltdown. I do hope it lasts.
Hey, it’s Monday night, and yes, I had Masterworks Chorale rehearsal, but guess what? I got some orchestration done this afternoon beforehand!
In fact, not only did I orchestrate 6. The King of Cats Orders an Early Breakfast, I orchestrated it twice, so now you get to compare and tell me which one is better. One has a piano, and the other doesn’t.
In both, I’ve used a clarinet to stand in for the vocalist, because he’s a capella for the first half, and the mp3 just was silly, with trumpet fanfares then seconds of silence. The clarinet sounds dumb, but at least you’ll know what the King of Cats is singing.
So here’s the piano score, the mp3 with piano, and the mp3 without piano.
The ones of you who have been paying attention have noticed that I’ve skipped No. 4 and No. 5 in our sequence. So sue me. 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests is almost done; I just want to even out some of the last part of it. 5. The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives involves a whole battery of percussion, up to and including a ratchet, and I hate dealing with percussion in the sequencer. Ick, ick, ick.
Perhaps someone with more legal savvy than I can let me know for sure, but I’m thinking I’m right on my perceptions here.
As far as I can tell, the McCain Torture Act, which was passed last week by both the House and Senate with no substantial opposition, has given permission to George W. Bush to
Please understand what I’m saying: the McCain Torture Act does not specify that these abrogations of U.S. and international law are to be applied only to suspected foreign terrorists, George W. Bush is free to arrest me. And you. And any other citizen of this nation. He has permission from Congress to do so.
And before I hear that whiny conservative rebuttal that nice people don’t have anything to fear, let me point out what they have missed: the McCain Torture Act empowers the President of the U.S. not to have to care about any of that. All he has to do is say you’re an enemy combatant or a supporter of one, and the rest of the machine falls into place. Even if you were innocent, you would never escape the machine: the guarantees of our Constitution no longer apply to you.
If someone can point out where in the McCain Torture Act that these acts are prohibited, I’d be glad to publish that here.
Last week, when I was invited to go meet a visiting Chinese delegation, I used the phrase habeas corpus in discussing current events, and my dinner partner asked if I were a lawyer, because I had used a legal term. The idea that an average citizen might know this term and what it meant did not occur to this citizen of the world’s largest authoritarian society.
Less than 24 hours later, the term ceased to have any real meaning in this society either. After all, as our President said about a year ago, the Constitution is “just a goddamned piece of paper.”
After cleaning house and my desk, I spent most of the day tinkering with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and trying to learn how it works.
Well, I think I know how it works, but getting it to actually perform is another thing. I tried two different approaches at the same time: downloading barebones templates that the author of this book offers on his website, and opening templates from within DreamWeaver. It might seem easier if I actually had a week off and had a chance to sit down with the book and go through it step by step.
I was almost successful in wresting the template to my will, although often I would change the color of a heading in a particular section in the stylesheet, and the actual webpage wouldn’t change at all. My goal is a revamping of my main website.
Another curious frustration is that none of the images I plugged into the page would show up in the browser. I haven’t read anything in my CSS research that suggests I have to trigger the display of images, so that may be tomorrow’s problem to solve.
In other news, we went to Decatur to celebrate Jobie Johnson’s 30th birthday. We left earlyish to make room for younger celebrants, so I’m sure we missed the male strippers.
Actually, this was another of those “life of glamor” days, where we attended the reception for Françoise Gilot and the renaming of the gallery at the Centre in her honor.
Still, every little bit helps, and today I fixed the harmony on that one transition in “Milky Way” that has bugged me, and probably everyone who had heard the piece. It’s the one where we’re moving into the Rabbit’s plaint that he’s getting cold. In the sequence of far-ranging chords that come after the main theme, we originally land on E major. This time, we hit E minor for the Rabbit. The problem was that chord between the E minor chord and the Rabbit’s entrance in E minor. Now, you might think that this was easy enough, just back off to B7 or something and come back in. But that didn’t really work for me.
So I played around and ended up going from the C minor chord in the far-ranging sequence into an F# min6 (who knew?) instead of a G# minor and dropping the entire “resolution” measure entirely. I think it works a lot better.
update later: I tinkered with the bass line and now it’s a B9. I’m getting so adventurous.