IV. Lento, another piece

Posted on by Dale

I forged ahead this morning, and I like it all except the very end of it. It’s not pesante enough. I had it all harmonized, but stripped almost all of that out and left it unison, and I’ve dropped everything down at least an octave.

Perhaps if I moved all the lower bass notes up an octave so that all the notes are no more than one octave apart…

Anyway, after I resolve that issue, then there’s one more slow bit before we hit the G major fabulousness. I may repeat some variant of the opening, or I may play it with strings only, very atonal and astringent. I’ll have to fiddle with it.

Here’s the new section. It starts where the opening left off.

In other news, Vampira is dead. I only read about it this morning in this week’s Time magazine, and I don’t know why I didn’t hear about it last week. I clearly missed checking Metafilter that day.

Hmph.

Posted on by Dale

Life is taunting me. Today’s Writer’s Almanac email featured Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies.” For no good reason. His birthday is not until May 12, and there was no connection to anything else in the email, other than perhaps Federico Fellini’s birthday. But that’s a tenuous connection.

I call it taunting, pure and simple. Because I actually starting connecting it to the Essentially Choral thing and thinking about accompaniment: piano, string trio, percussion.

But there’s no way I can set six stanzas before March!

Opportunities… ugh.

Posted on by Dale

Two pieces of mail came today from the American Composers Forum, of which I am a member.

The first is in cooperation with Vocal Essence, the group that had the Christmas Carol competition that I did not win last fall. (I heard the winner on NPR’s Performance Today. It was very pretty.) They’ve announced a call for scores for their Essentially Choral program, an opportunity for “emerging composers.” I guess I qualify.

Anyway, the deal is an SATB piece, either a capella or with instrumental accompaniment, up to five instruments. No keyboard by itself. Any text. No previous public performance. Deadline is March 14.

The second opportunity is in cooperation with the American Music Center and the Minnesota Orchestra, and it’s the 8th annual Composer Institute. Up to nine lucky “emerging composers” will work for a week with Alan Jay Kernis and the Minnesota Orchestra, finally hearing their orchestral work performed.

The deal here is orchestral work, not choral, 15 minutes or less in length (although longer works will be considered). Not previously performed or read by a major orchestra. Deadline is March 7.

So now the question is, will IV. Lento-Allegro be ready by then? One would hope. If I’m actually writing a symphony to be performed this summer, I would need to write one movement every 47 days or so. I need to be finished with this one by mid-February. So that might actually be doable.

The choral thing I’m not so sure about. I’m not sitting on any text that I feel the need to set. I know one of my Lichtenbergian goals is to set Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies,” but I really was thinking that might be my aprés-symphonie oeuvre.

In other news, I did hear from Noah, so he’s alive and well. He was indeed closing on a house, plus some heavy-duty work on some big internet clients, so he hadn’t had time to finish getting lichtenbergian.org up and running. Maybe this weekend. And then…

In other other news, I sent out an appeal to GHP staff for photos, and now I have probably more than I can use, which is great. So I’ll be spending this weekend and Monday getting the video reassembled. Sunday is for composing.

Word of the day

Posted on by Dale

I bought myself a Forgotten English daily calendar, because I like old words, and these seem to be ones I’ve never heard of before.

Today’s word I especially like: neezled. It means, according to North of England Words, Walter Skeat (1873), a little drunk or intoxicated.

Hear, hear, say I.

IV. Lento, moving forward

Posted on by Dale

Or at least trying to move forward.

I started a passage, picking up where I left off yesterday, starting in the low strings and building up that four-note opening theme (C D Eb B nat., if you’d like to toy with it), bringing each layer of strings in every measure at a higher iteration, continuing the counterpoint in previous voices, adding woodwinds as we go, rounding out a four-measure phrase with a descending chromatic passage, bringing in the trumpet with the agitato motif beneath, continuing with the brass doing the same thing, more and more instruments, more and more tension, bringing back the 32nd-note sextuplets, until finally the entire orchestra is shrieking, running into the brick wall of that descending chromatic pattern, exhausted and shrill.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I got the first four measures done.

In other news, I’m screwed. The external hard drive which contained all my Final Cut Pro files for the GHP parent orientation video died. It is gone, and I’m more than a little reluctant to spend the $200 it would take to retrieve what amounts to one CD’s worth of files.

That means I can’t edit/update the video for 2008. It means I have to rebuild the file in Final Cut Express with just narration and graphics, unless I can find some photos of the summers gone by. Perhaps Flickr might be of some assistance?

It also means I’m going to be reshooting video all summer. However, my plan is to have either my school and/or GHP buy a cool little Flip video camera to do it with.

Update

Posted on by Dale

Still no word from Noah on the website. Very odd. Perhaps he’s imbibed from the Lichtenbergian wellspring of procrastination. (I know he’s closing on a new house in San Jose, so he might have been gone for the weekend.)

Cras melior est.

Muddling through

Posted on by Dale

9:45 am

I’ve worked on the opening to IV. Lento-Allegro for about an hour, and I think it’s approaching usability. I left the brass chorale as is, I had considered altering it, I’ve answered it with the woodwinds, and then let the brass have another say. It actually sounds symphonic. And other than the opening phrase, I’ve been able to do without the string section. That’s kind of a breakthrough for me. I guess my orchestration lessons from Dvorak are working.

Now, however, I’ve rounded out the opening, I think. I’ve bruited the main theme enough so that the savvy critic can say, ah yes, I see, and it’s time to move on to the meat of the matter.

The meat of the matter is always the issue, isn’t it? How do I get there from here?

More later.

11:30 am

Wasn’t as hard as I thought. Just repeat a bass/cello motif, round the key up to G major, and launch into the main theme.

There is an mp3 this time, but be advised:* the main theme is supposed to be a solo violin and I was too lazy to wrestle with the computer on this fact, and I don’t know why said solo violin is cutting notes short when it’s not supposed to. So, you gotta hear it under lights, as a character in the musical version of a Rostand play the Marx Bros. version of which I’m supposed to be writing songs for instead of this symphony might have said.

* I went back in at 3:00 pm and wrestled with the computer.

8:30 pm

So maybe you didn’t like the opening. Here’s a new version of the very opening statement.

Update, plus the Good Driver Fallacy

Posted on by Dale

I just checked http://lichtenborgian.org, and the coming soon page is up, but I haven’t received any access info from Noah, nor can I see it in my FTP utility. I’ve emailed him and expect to hear from him as soon as he gets to his computer out in California. And then… then…

So over on the Lacuna blog, Jeff pointed us to a book review in the Times, of Stumbling on Happiness, the main point of which in its applicability to us Lichtenbergians is that humans are an easily deluded lot, mostly by ourselves, and mostly to maintain our happiness.

The author cites the notorious statistical anomaly that “90% of drivers rate themselves above average,” which is usually used to show how self-deluded most people are. Because, clearly, 90% of drivers cannot be above the 50% mark, can they? It’s like, as is often smirkingly said, Lake Wobegon’s children. Or NCLB test scores.

But I have some questions about this much-quoted and much-derided statistic. Could it not be a fallacy itself?

For one thing, what’s the scale of “good drivership”? For the 90% figure to be wrong, there would have to be an objective rating scale of good drivership that would allow you to place all drivers along it. What counts? Accidents? Slamming on brakes? Driving with coffee? Cell phones? Five mph over the speed limit? Six?

For all I know, the original study that created this zombie factoid had such a methodology. I’m too lazy to go find it. But my next question was, were participants in the study asked to rate themselves with this scale, or were they asked to decide where they would fall on such a scale without being given any details? I suspect the latter, which is actually okay as long as then they were asked to fill out some kind of survey which then would place them accurately along the scale.

Because, and this is the important part, I think that the unexamined assumption of the 90% deal is that drivers are distributed across this scale in a normal curve, i.e., 70% of drivers cluster around the 50% mark, and the rest of us are strung out on either side, with very few awful drivers and very few perfect drivers, just like IQ.

However, I doubt that. I think it entirely possible that we are not distributed in a normal curve, but a J-curve, and in fact most of us are better drivers on an absolute scale than not. In other words, while the researchers were applying a norm reference, the real world is working with a criterion reference. Most people quite rightly examine their driving habits and say, “You know what, I’ve never had an accident, and I can’t remember the last time I even slammed on my brakes or went down a one-way street the wrong way. I did cut that guy off on the interstate last week, but he was a bad driver.” And so they rate themselves “above average,” because in fact they are.

Okay, so maybe it’s not a J-curve, which would mean that most drivers are approaching perfect, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s at least a shifted normal curve, with that main 70% clumped around the 80% mark and not the middle.

Damned statistics.

IV.Lento-Allegro, molto agitato

Posted on by Dale

I tried to work on a molto agitato sequence for IV. Lento-Allegro last night, but I wasn’t feeling well for some reason. I know what I want, for once, and I could even hear it in my head, but I couldn’t concentrate. It kept coming out wrong, and the orchestration was absolutely appalling, although I can’t tell whether it’s me or the software. I think I want cellos, but it’s not sounding right, not stressful enough.

Part of the problem is that in order to get the computer to sound like what I want the orchestra to sound like, I have to over-indicate in the score. Real players would look at the command molto agitato and immediately tackle the passage with shorter bowing and stronger attacks on the strings. The computer is not so savvy. (Of course, I didn’t actually mark it agitato, so maybe it’s smarter than I think.)

I often ran into this problem in William Blake. I would have to fill the score with markings that I think would only overwhelm actual players just to get it to sound like I wanted it to.

On the other hand, it never hurts to be specific.

However, nothing was working last night, not the melodic line, not the shape of the thing, and certainly not the orchestration. The trumpets were too loud, it was the wrong key for them to sound right, and the basses were muddy. So I left it in sketches and went to bed early.