So is there untoward glee in my reaction to evangelical-yet-oh-so-queer Ted Haggard’s precipitous fall from his pedestal?
You bet your ass there is. I am sneering with undisguised and unmitigated delight. And here’s why: he deserves it. Not only he deserves it, but everyone linked to him, either in his Colorado Springs hellhole of conservative theocons or through his presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals or through his Republican get-out-the-vote machinery, they all deserve it.
Even though I didn’t have full time at the computer tonight owing to a social event, I have orchestrated more or less halfway through Milky Way. And this time I have an mp3 to prove it.
Lots and lots of tempo glitches in this one, since the orchestral sound is really too large for my laptop to calculate on the fly. Whenever there’s a dropout in the playback, it shows up as a hiccup in the recording.
Still, it sounds nice. I’m sure it will evolve further.
By the way, is anyone writing their novel this month?
My luck holds with Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. Tonight I got another 18 measures orchestrated, and although I think I still have some polishing to do, what I have is still fine. (I’m not ready to post it as an mp3, however.)
One thing I’m learning is to hold back my resources. I remember reading (in several places) that Schumann would never trust his winds to hold the line on their own and consequently muddied his textures unnecessarily by doubling them with the strings. I’m afraid I suffer from his fears. But as I listen to symphonic music these days, I pay particular attention to those times when the woodwinds especially are holding down the fort all on their own, and I try to force myself to use them as they were meant to be used.
I think I’ve been successful in that passage which follows the line “and I fear we will finish it old,” m. 31-34. I’ve sprinkled that melodic line all the way down the woodwinds section before picking back up with the strings at the end. It sounds like real music.
In fact, this represents progress on a problem that has been facing me since I finished Milky Way: how to orchestrate the nearly constant sixteenth note passages that drive most of the piece. I knew I would have to find ways to vary who’s playing them, or it would be insanely boring if not outright grating. Up to this passage, it’s just been the celli, which is fine, since it establishes the themes. But from here on out it’s got to be shared amongst the rest of the orchestra.
Today’s Masterworks, of course, but Ginny asked me also to design a t-shirt for the ladies she has assembled to work backstage at the beauty pageant coming up. Those of you who know Ginny may be wondering exactly why Ginny has assembled anyone to do anything with a beauty pageant, but let that pass. After November 11, invite us to dinner and you’ll get lots of fun stories.
Anyway, she wanted a tiara and the words Pageant Posse in script on the design. I did that and it was lovely, but I felt it needed something. So I added the words “Butt spray makes us stronger” on the bottom. Now it was perfect.
The client, however, rejected that design for the plainer version.
It’s Sunday evening, and I haven’t posted since Thursday. This is because Ginny and I went to a bed & breakfast in Marietta on Friday and have been incommunicato since then. This also means my creative output has been minimum, needless to say.
However, the weekend was not a total loss. On Saturday night, we went to the Center for Puppetry Arts to see The Ghastly Dreadfuls’ Compendium of Graveyard Tales and Other Curiosities, by Jon Ludwig and Jason von Hinezmeyer. This was partly because none of the theatres were playing anything I thought would interest us, and partly because I wanted to see what state-of-the-art puppetry looked like these days. In other words, I was looking for ideas to steal for William Blake.
And again, I say, ha!
After how many days of essentially nothing, I have produced this [an mp3 of the first 20 measures which has been superseded by further development], the orchestration of the opening of 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. The mp3 is missing some of the subtlety of the original file, and Finale/GPO wouldn’t know a tenuto from its ass, so you’ll have to imagine some finesse here, but boy, this is good. It’s really good. It’s so good I’m afraid to go on.
[note, 11/4/06: this post has attracted beaucoups of spam comments, so I’ve turned comments off for it. If you have a comment, email it to me and I’ll post it for you.]
I forced myself to get started orchestrating the four big pieces. I had been dreading it because, as I’ve whined before, my nearly-four-year-old-laptop doesn’t have the power to handle even a small orchestra in Finale using Garritan Personal Orchestra.
I was right to dread it. For some reason, it couldn’t even burp out two horns, a cello, and a double bass plucking two notes. After getting not even four measures of Milky Way done, I gave up.
Which is not to say that I didn’t accomplish anything today. I redesigned a couple more pages of my website, which didn’t take any time of course. The pages that will take time are the ones that use formatting not already covered by my templated css stylesheet. I now have to actually tweak the css myself.
And a new feature of this column: I’ve decided to take paragraphs from Times articles about other places and substitute U.S. names and places in them. Where there are numbers, I’ll do like Juan Cole has done and extrapolate them to U.S. dimensions.
Today’s example, from “Bush, Facing Dissent on Iraq, Jettisons ‘Stay the Course'”:
Mr. Rumsfeld said Monday that the benchmarks under discussion included projections on when the U.S. might be able to take control of more of the country’s 50 states. Only five states are under full U.S. security administration, though officials say they hope the number will rise to sixteen or seventeen by the end of the year.
And they say the media doesn’t report the good news.
Mondays are always slow, of course, but I did finally get my actual homepage redesigned in CSS and posted. It’s a patch, using a template from DreamWeaver that I’ve adapted, but it’s gotten me used to messing with CSS. Now I can re-do the other pages on the side.
The challenge will be the Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro page, which still uses frames and is icky.