The wrath of librarians (Day 25/365)

Posted on by Dale

So we’re down to eight planets.

In a cosmic game of Ten Little Indians, the International Astronomical Union has voted that to be called a planet, an object must be in orbit around a star, be big enough for its gravity to collapse itself into a round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

This vote on a topic contentious for the past year eliminates Ceres (an asteroid), and Xena (out in the Kuiper Belt) from the competition. It also knocks Pluto completely off the nation’s placemats. They are now lumped together under the new rubric dwarf planet. At least they escaped demotion to small solar system bodies.

Ah, well. C’est la astronomie.

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Dissatisfaction (Day 24/365)

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I’ve decided I’ve got to do more work away from the computer. I’m not so much composing, in the sense of hearing music and creating the notation for that on paper, a.k.a. “writing it down”, as I am playing with dots on a computer monitor and listening to the results. It’s almost dada-istic as an approach, and I don’t think I like it any more.

Music (Day 23/365)

Posted on by Dale

A couple of things tonight, and these are really randomly written:

I played with the interlude leading up to the climax of “Milky Way” and have been having some success with messing with the rhythm. I also began forcing myself to think in terms of eventual orchestral sounds, contrasts in volume, etc. It had dawned on me on one of my walks that the big climax (the narrator’s “I shall never part day from night”) could very well be an enormous climax and I could pull out all the stops, big brass maybe and augmentation of the theme, motives, etc. Nothing like a rolling tympani to get these things going, of course.

I also, in my string quartet file entitled “abortive sketches”, began playing with polytonality. This is really where I wish I had gotten a degree in composition. Somebody could have taught me this, and no matter how painful it would have been to learn all this crap, it would have been less painful than trying to discover it on my own.

At any rate, a handful of measures of that was astonishingly effective. Is this all it takes to sound serious, the accompaniment in C and the melody in A? I remember being intrigued by Sondheim’s use of polytonality in Into the Woods, how any of us got our notes, I’ll never know. But then he’s a master.

And now, looking over that score, I have to think about whether I need to totally revisit “Milky Way” to explore a more astringent sound. Do I want a scarier walk? Or should it be lush and tonal? The beginning is already dissonant within reason. I always lose sight of that, though, as I keep working and having fun with pure triads.

I know, I’ll just go back and insert some seconds.

Music (Day 22/365)

Posted on by Dale

So tonight I just farted around with music. I opened up a string quartet document, threw in some whole notes, played with chord progressions, and limited myself to eight measures. I played with crescendos, with articulations, and then moved on.

I changed tempo, key, and time signature. I threw in the main theme from the symphony and played with that as a string quartet theme, adding a lilting viola accompaniment.

Most of it sucked, and I’m leaving it where it lies. Next!

A different kind of creativity (Day 21/365)

Posted on by Dale

So this was different: Benjie sends me email, urging me to enter the My Dream App contest, and so I did.

The concept is simple: you describe your dream application, something you’d love to have on your Macintosh OS X computer, and submit it. A team of judges will narrow the field to 24 apps, and then a couple of weeks of blogging and refining, etc., goes on, and then The People vote on the top three. Then the sponsors of the contest actually develop those three pieces of software.

Winners get MacBook Pro laptops and some other stuff (I wasn’t paying attention), plus 15% royalties on the new software. Pretty cool.

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Head-spinningly complicated lives: a post (Day 20/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went for one of my walks this morning and sketched out an interesting B theme for the symphony, so I was going to post about that, I really was, but then the Times splashed all over its SundayStyles section a story I absolutely could not not write about. Kevin, cover your ears.

Above the fold is a huge photograph of a happy family, a happy toddler being tickled by the handsome dad, the warm-looking mother smiling into the camera on the sidelines. The headline is The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack, and the feature is about transgendered men: women who surgically become men. The dad, Shane, used to be Sharon.

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More poetry (Day 19/365)

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I went back and worked on that missing line in the second stanza:

A trip, vacation time, a deep design
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.

Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear,
a proclamation unexpected here.
It’s almost past me, gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing?

Assessment (Day 18/365)

Posted on by Dale

Not that anyone is going to call me out on it, but I haven’t lived up to my end of the bargain this week. I haven’t done a creative thing every day.

Well, of course not, people will say. You had to take Grayson up to Guilford. You had things to do, emotions to deal with, huge rainstorms to drive through with stinging tears rolling down your cheeks, etc., etc.

But it seems to me that part of a project like this is that you do something every day. It’s part of the discipline of the thing. And I haven’t found that discipline and that rhythm yet.

I completely understand that the creative process requires downtime. Even when I’m not sitting in front of my computer or music notebook, I can be mulling over what to do next with “Milky Way.” Often your best ideas come from after you’ve walked away from the problem. That’s happened to me all the time.

Still, that downtime can be spent on other projects, which is why I have tried to get several things going: William Blake, the symphony, the 341 poem. And this week I’ve just slacked off.

One of my biggest weaknesses, and you’ll hear me whine about this a lot in the coming year, is that my abilities as a composer are really hit or miss. I have no formal training in composition, so I’m usually floundering my way through whatever it is I’m working on. What this means for the daily discipline thing is that I am unable to sit down and work for a quick ten minutes, say, on the “Milky Way” problem because I don’t have a trained understanding of the mechanics of the solution. That is, knowing that I have to extend the climactic nature of the passage, delaying it for another eight measures (for example), is no help at all when I don’t have the knowledge set of how to do that harmonically.

Ah well, as dear Sammy Beckett always said, “Keep going. Going on. Call that going? Call that on?”

More poetry (Day 17/365)

Posted on by Dale

More work on the 341 poem:

A trip, vacation time, a deep desire
to get away from life. The car is flying
down the state. I’m on 341,
avoiding interstates. We’re free, begun
already, driving green and vacant roads
to gain the ocean, waves, the beach, the coast.

Shooting out of Perry onto shaded
road, pecan orchards on either side,
I see the square, staked sign appear.
– / -/ -/ -/ – here|clear|near
It’s almost past me, gone before
I’ve read it: Georgia’s High Tech Corridor.

What? The image, the idea won’t
clear itself, resolve: these orchards don’t
have anything to do with how we live
in any area but this. I give
my head a little shake. So what possessed
the Georgia Legislature to suggest
this thing?

On getting old: a post (Day 16/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’m now officially old.

I know, everyone will roll their eyes. How can I be old? I don’t look old. People younger than I look years older than I do. I don’t act old. There are people who now have tattoos who wouldn’t if it were not for my influence.

But I’m old. Yesterday, I proudly put on my rear windshield the obligatory sticker: Guilford Dad.

I could have chosen just a plain Guilford decal, or one that said Guilford College, or one that had their new oak tree logo next to the name. But with a strange feeling in my stomach, I bought the one that says what I am: Guilford Dad.

I’m not as old as the doctor from Louisville, 73, who has seven sons: the oldest is 41 and the youngest, 18, now at Guilford. This is a man who obviously does not know when to quit.

But I’m old enough to be qualified by a rear window decal: Dad. Someone who is old enough to send an ungodly amount of money to a wonderful college to educate his son. And clearly someone who is proud of his son for making it possible for him to send an ungodly amount of money to this institution.

Yes, he slacked his way through high school, preferring to come from behind for a finish that was “good enough,” and I’m worried sick that he has shortchanged himself in preparation for the tough courses ahead of him, but he’s smart, he’s funny, he’s kind, and he’s good. He’ll be okay. He’ll be better than okay. Of course, if he would email or call, I’d know right now how okay he was. See, I am old.

I feel like Monet in his garden, or Charles Ives after he quit composing. I don’t know why; their old age issues had nothing to do with sons. They just spring to mind. With any luck, I can be Monet and keep working, instead of Ives, who didn’t.