As good as nothing (Day 30/365)

Posted on by Dale

I spent the day thinking about where to go from my newly polished climax of “Milky Way” to get to the last two stanzas of the poem.

Last year, when I was finally deciding how to tackle this piece (I had put it off for twenty years), I decided that it would be in a modified sonata allegro form. For one thing, the A theme (the setting of the first stanza) and the B theme (second stanza) would have to be reversed in the capitulation, since the last two stanzas are mirror images of the first two.

So the puzzle I have (it’s not a hard one) is now that I’ve given the listener a really traditional recap, with the triumphant restatement of the opening chords, I have to twist sideways and lead into the B theme, only in a minor key (because of the rat’s grotesque cynicism) and then back out into the A theme for the final statement.

And there will be another puzzle: Ms. Willard has ended the poem not on a transcendant note but a blunt “handful of dirt to the rat.”

Anyway, I was going to get a lot of this worked out tonight, but I got dragged out to dinner with friends. Oh well.

Revamping the Milky Way (Day 29/365)

Posted on by Dale

Well, I cleaned off my drafting table, bought a USB extension cable, moved my keyboard over to the table, got out my manuscript paper, and got to work.

My project, you may recall, was to tackle the faulty climax to “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” the tenth and central piece to A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. I transcribed the first measure of the Tiger’s “I shall garland my room” passage and started there.

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Chorus (Day 28/365)

Posted on by Dale

Tonight was the first night back at Masterworks. We have a heavy Christmas program, a couple of smaller gigs, and a concert in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on March 10.

It was good to be singing again. All we did was sightread, but even that was challenging and fun. The music selection for the November concert is varied and interesting, from Praetorius through Handel up to Britten and Berlin. Nice stuff.

Huge chorus this year! The bass section covered half the back row, and baritones and tenors were not far behind.

It might be nice to write for a chorus like that, but I think I’ll spend my energies on pieces that won’t be performed by imaginary groups rather than ignored by one I’m a member of.

Almost nothing (Day 27/365)

Posted on by Dale

I almost did nothing. I cleaned up my work area, clearing the drafting table to serve as my “away from the computer” composition area. I read more of my CSS book.
In other news, I have a couple of uses for my lottery winnings:

  • Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia will be opening in New York soon. That’s a three-play work covering the lives of the Russian intellectuals involved in the 1830s revolutionary work. It made no sense to me when I read it (as in, why did he write this?) and I’d like to see if it makes more sense when you see it. So that’s at least three nights in NYC I could spend money on.
  • Also in NYC, Mr. Nebojsa Kaludjerovic is the sole employee of the U.N. mission of Montenegro, which recently, and peacefully, gained its independence from Serbia. He’s the ambassador, the secretary, the bookkeeper, etc. He used to be the ambassador from the combined countries, working out of a mansion on 5th Ave. Now he works out of his apartment, using his son’s laptop to check his Gmail account. The country of Montenegro is multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious, and yet it has remained peaceful and democratic throughout the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. I’d like to buy the man some office supplies for his new office.
  • I’d go to Kiva.org and fund all the developing businesses there.

Nothing, Nada (Day 26/365)

Posted on by Dale

Sorry, it was one of those days. I did nothing. I can’t even claim to have cleaned up my study and cleaned off my drafting table in preparation for composing away from the computer. I just read.

I read my book on Leibniz and Spinoza. I think I’m siding with Spinoza at this point. I read Louis Sachar’s sequel to Holes, called Small Steps. Any goodwill invested in our main character Armpit from Holes is diluted by a made-for-Disney plot; it was a good book, but not very believable and certainly not as good as Holes. I read my new book on CSS and how to design websites with it, which is one of my goals for the fall.

But otherwise, nothing. Nada. Zip.

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)

Posted on by Dale

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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