A weekend away (Days 88, 89, 90/365)

Posted on by Dale

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.

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Ha! (Day 87/365)

Posted on by Dale

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After how many days of essentially nothing, I have produced this [an mp3 of the first 20 measures which has been superseded by further development], the orchestration of the opening of 10.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.]

Little progress (Day 85/365)

Posted on by Dale

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.

Musings (Day 82/365)

Posted on by Dale

In the white heat of work… or what passes for it… I find that my posts have been simply, “Look, here’s today’s results.” I haven’t been very interesting in my writing, I’m afraid.

It’s not there’s been no struggle in getting William Blake’s Inn orchestrated. There’s been plenty. But it’s nothing to write about. Choosing whether to use the trombone or not is not exactly an existential dilemma. (For the record, I prefer the double bass.)

However, I feel as if I’m at a place where I need to pause for a moment and look about, to see where I need to go next. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Cancer Ward that you had to beware the “final inch,” that point at which you’re nearly finished with a project and you begin dragging your feet in order not to finish it. There is something terrible about being done with a project, and most creative types relish the creative frenzy of starting a project than the tedium and finality of wrapping one up.

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Not a lot (Day 81/365)

Posted on by Dale

I didn’t create a lot today. I designed and started a spiffy display in the display case at school for the 100 Book Club, but nothing on William Blake or anything like that.

Since Grayson is home for fall break, we went to the Georgia Aquarium and then to eat at the Pleasant Peasant, so that’s where that time went.

The Georgia Aquarium is quite spectacular, although design-wise I much prefer the Tennessee Aquarium. Georgia’s big show, the whale shark tank, is huge, and I like the fact that you get multiple views of it, and that there are places to sit and just watch, something that Tennessee really could use for its biggie, the Gulf tank. Tennessee has more written material with each exhibit, but Georgia uses staffers (mostly volunteer) to answer questions and to engage the audience.

The main design issue with Georgia Aquarium is the great atrium. It really does look like a food court, and I don’t think the colorful facades of each attraction “pod” are going to age well. It’s also very loud.

Still, it’s worth the trip, because aquariums are always beautiful.

Tale of the Tailor (Day 80/365)

Posted on by Dale

After I posted Sun & Moon Circus last night on the William Blake page, I realized that I had never posted an mp3 of the piano score of the final piece, 15. Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor. So I whipped one up and posted it.

Now the collection is complete, for those of you who want your very own copy of the piano scores and a CD to go with them.

I keep saying Tale of the Tailor is the final piece, but it’s not. There’s an epilogue, and it must be set to music. But I’m going to write it later, probably during rehearsal. It’s going to be a quolibet of themes, ending as it began with the opening number’s music.

So there it is. Thirty-four minutes of music.

Now what?

Sun & Moon Circus (Day 79/365)

Posted on by Dale

I worked on cleaning up 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests. It’s OK, but I’m betting we revisit it in rehearsal. There are a couple of hiccups where my little laptop just didn’t have the computing power to get all the beats into each measure.

Here’s the piano score and orchestral mp3 of 4. The Sun and Moon Circus Soothes the Wakeful Guests.

I also updated one choral part in 10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way.

Now I burn this CD and pop it into the mail with the score.