Out of our minds (Day 105/365)

Posted on by Dale

It’s a Monday, and that means Masterworks practice, so instead of even trying to forge another couple of measures out of Milky Way, I sat down to dig into Out of our minds: learning to be creative, by Sir Ken Robinson.

Nice long intro about the predicament we will find ourselves in if we keep de-valuing creativity in the educational process, and then the first chapter. Sir Ken has been involved in the field for a long, long time, consulting with huge firms and individual schools alike. This book is both a summation of the research and a call for action on the part of all involved: government, business, and education.

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No composition (Day 104/365)

Posted on by Dale

Even though I didn’t write a single note today, it was still a creative day.

The Masterworks Chorale sang a little Christmas program on the Court Square this afternoon, and after it was over, Ginny and I were chatting with friends. On the spur of the moment we decided we needed to get together for dinner, and we mapped out who was bringing what.

I did the shrimp and grits, from a recipe from Natalie Dupree’s Shrimp & Grits cookbook, as well as cornbread. It was fun getting all that ready for preparation and having it come together: ready at the same time, cooked well, and delicious.

It’s fun to cook for friends and have plenty of wine/champagne and good food. It’s fun to have friends who can share and talk and laugh and be together.

That’s my creativity for the day: creating a meal around which friends can be together.

UPDATE: The other users on the Finale forums do not give me much hope about improving my playback. Even if the new MacBook Pros have more memory, the piece of the puzzle that is problematic is the Kontakt Player. Kontakt is a gigantic sequencer; Kontakt Player is a little version that other programs (like Finale) use to suck up sounds like Garritan Personal Orchestra for their own use. It seems that Kontakt Player has not been updated to work correctly on the Mac’s new use of Intel chips. (Intel Native, we call it.) In other words, even though Finale works fine on the new computers, Kontakt does not and has to be run under Apple’s emulator program, called Rosetta. Still slow, and still not good enough.

In search of… (Day 103/365)

Posted on by Dale

So today I went to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall. My plan was simple: find a MacBook Pro with at least 2GB of RAM, pop the Milky Way Finale file onto it, and then see if Finale could play it. I even made an appointment at the Genius Bar so that I wouldn’t have to flag down a passing teenager with a black t-shirt on.

Well, Genius is as genius does, and we all know about simple plans.

They didn’t have Finale loaded on any of the machines, and in fact they don’t sell it in the store at all. (They do sell one of MakeMusic’s entry level programs.) The Genius turned me over to a salesperson, who suggested that he see if they had a refurbished MacBook Pro that met my specifications, and then I could buy it and take it home to see if it worked.

If it didn’t work (and even if it did), I could return it, and since it was a refurbished model there would be no restocking fee.

Wouldn’t you know it, there was no such machine in the back room. So I was spared the indignity of having to buy a $3000 used machine to take home and try out.

The rest of the day I spent with Jobie doing the usual: shopping, seeing a movie, grabbing a burger at a gay sports bar. This was the first time I was ever in a gay bar where I felt out of place, so to speak: twenty televisions, all tuned to some football game, and a bar full of jocks screaming at them. The fact that some of the jocks were kissing each other wasn’t the problem.

We will now pause while Marc makes some egregious comment connecting the above paragraph and the title of this post.

Anyway, when I returned home, I went to Finale’s website and posted my problem on the user forum, which is what I should have done in the first place.

Progress, of a kind (Day 102/365)

Posted on by Dale

As is often the case when I’m stuck, I retreat to the printed word.

After my recent frustration with my attempts to orchestrate the central passage (mm. 62-71) of Milky Way, I decided to do some academic homework. I pulled out The Study of Orchestration, Samuel Adler, second edition, and actually read some of the sections on orchestrating different sections of the orchestra.

While it’s not as funny as Norman Del Mar’s Anatomy of the Orchestra, let’s face it, few books are, the Adler is nonetheless well written and useful. I sat beside my fire in the living room and read the chapters on woodwinds and brass as deployed in a full orchestra, and I began to think through these measures.

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Some computer work (Day 101/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today, still basking in the glow of our having retaken Congress, I began to think ahead to the future of the 100 Book Club.

Let me back up a bit. While anyone of any seriousness was working hard to restore progressive sanity to our government, I’ve been trying to establish an alternative to the Accelerated Reader™ program.

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I wish there were more (Day 100/365)

Posted on by Dale

The 100th day. Probably it’s time for one of those soul-searching assessments.

On the whole, I’ve accomplished a lot: finished the composition for William Blake’s Inn, started the orchestration of same, putzed around with the Hwy 341 poem, mused (before I got heavily into the William Blake problems) about a putative symphony, and ranted liberally from time to time.

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Nothing (Day 99/365)

Posted on by Dale

Today was Masterworks Chorale, so I guess I can count that, but otherwise it was a day of voting and worrying.

After Masterworks, Ginny and I went to Mike McGraw’s post-election party. By the time we got there, there was no suspense, alas. Despite the fact that most people in the nation seem to have tumbled to the Republican Party’s bottom-feeding nature, the Third District chose to send our particular plecostomous back.

I think if I were in charge of Democratic messaging, my main point would be, “If you re-elect Republicans, they will keep doing the same things.” And then list those same things: cut income for necessary government spending while borrowing money to pay for increased government spending; support a unitary executive without question or oversight; support disastrous foreign policy; indulge in rampant cronyism and incestuous lobbyists; and push a Taliban-like socioreligious agenda.

But that’s just me.

After giving Mike (and Renee) our condolences, we went home, and I went to bed. I couldn’t watch the election returns. I just couldn’t. I would have to wake up to a new world, for better or for worse.

Milky Way (Day 98/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went back and reworked the measures I had blocked in last night. They’re getting there, although I still can’t hear exactly what they should sound like because of the computer. I tried switching over to the SoftSynth sounds, since they don’t have the memory issues, but they sounded very strident.

I’m now into the first part of that climactic portion that gave me so much trouble nearly 60 days ago. It’s got to sound exactly right, and I have a feeling I’m going to have to work with it a lot… and with a computer that doesn’t have the power to give me what I need. Feh.

Slogging away at Milky Way (Day 97/365)

Posted on by Dale

I got a few more measures done on Milky Way today. It wasn’t as much as I had hoped, because we had to clean the back porch off for the painters to start pressure washing the house tomorrow. I had some maintenance kinds of things to do as well. I felt like poor Niggle in Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle.

It was headway of a sort, however. I got into that little interlude part that I was afraid was going to be difficult to do. It doesn’t seem to be, but the piece is now getting to where it is absolutely too much for my laptop to handle. I got buzzy overload through the whole section I was working on tonight, so I can’t really tell whether it was working or not.

Nothing (Day 96/365)

Posted on by Dale

The only creativity in evidence today was a couple of notes I made in my notebook about some changes I want to make in some of the pieces I’ve already orchestrated.

Otherwise, I cleaned house and rearranged the kitchen cabinets.

I finished reading Miss Hickory, a Newbery Award winner from the 1940s. A very, very odd book. She’s a doll made with an apple twig for a body and a hickory nut for a head. Very hard-headed she is, a point made repeatedly by Squirrel. She normally lives in a corncob house near the Old House, but the family has up and gone to Boston for the school year, abandoning her.

Through the kindness of several animals (which she barely appreciates), she finds a new home in an old robin’s nest, and the rest of the book concerns itself with inching through the fall and winter months, observing all the animals and Miss Hickory’s interactions with them. She’s a stubborn busybody and not very likable.

Still, it is incredibly shocking when, in the spring, she is forced out of her nest by Robin’s return. Seeking shelter, she goes into what she thinks is Squirrel’s abandoned cleft at the base of the apple tree. He’s there, nearly starving, and after she chides him one too many times for being an idiot, he eats her head. And it keeps talking while he’s eating it!! It sums up her failings for her and finally gives her a taste of her own medicine.

Headless, she climbs back up the apple tree until she comes to a limb with a split in it. She sticks her neck into it, and that’s where the little human girl who abandoned her in the fall finds her, now part of the apple tree as a grafted scion.

Ewww. It’s one of the creepiest endings I’ve ever read.