I might actually have this finished by Friday night.1
It’s still too wander-y for my tastes in the development section. That’s what Successive Approximation is for.
Easier Piece #5 (12/16/15): mp3
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1 No, I won’t.
New cocktail: the Quarter Moon
Here’s an as-yet unnamed a new cocktail:
The Quarter Moon
- 1-1/2 oz bourbon or rye (bourbon preferred)
- 1 oz Tuaca liqueur
- 1/2 oz Averna Amaro
- orange peel
Shake Stir,[1] pour into martini glass, garnish with orange peel.
It has a great bitterness to it which includes both the Tuaca’s vanilla/orange undertones and the orange peel’s fresh oils. A bourbon version would be sweeter than the rye—worth trying!
update: The bourbon version is actually superior! I’ve named it the Quarter Moon for no good reason. The orange peel is essential.
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[1] Don’t know why I wrote “shake,” when cocktails without citrus juices in them are to be stirred, not shaken. (James Bond was deliberately ordering his drinks diluted.)
A small rant
This quick rant is brought to you by the Lichtenbergian Precept of Task Avoidance: by writing this, I’m avoiding work on the Easier Piece #5.
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During a recent Facebook discussion about tax rates—and it was a discussion, not an insane bout of poo-flinging—we were treated to the old rightwing shibboleth of not wanting a higher, progressive tax rate on the wealthy because it would “punish success,” somehow disincentivizing the ruling class from being productive members of society.
I have never understood why people believe this kind of thing, other than they’ve had it hammered into their brains by the very people whom it benefits. It makes no logical sense.
I am supposed to believe that a class of people who are distinguished by their rapacious and never-ending greed would suddenly stop their money-making activities if we forced them to contribute more of their income to the common welfare? Leaving aside any worldviews about whether the government can even because reasons, that’s just stupid talk.
Why would the opposite not be true? Why, if we suddenly confiscated more of their income through progressive taxation, would the ultra-wealthy not double down to make more to keep? Seems to me that would be the more logical outcome, given what we’ve seen to be true about that class.
So we raise tax rates back to where they were when we had a strong middle class, and the upper classes contribute more, the government reduces the budget deficit, the economy improves, the middle class gets more money to spend and the upper class is more productive. What’s not to like?
Five Easier Pieces, an abortive attempt
I don’t know when I became averse to posting my abortive attempts, but I think it’s true that I have. I’d like to be generous and say that it’s because I like to surprise and delight my readers with a finished product, but the truth is probably closer to the fact that when what I’m working on is a deliberately “simpler” piano piece that will probably be only two minutes long, I don’t want anyone to know how ineptly I struggle with hacking my way through it.
I’ve whined before about not being able to play the piano and how it hampers my growth/expertise as a composer, and never has that been more true than with these bagatelles. (Another whine: my USB keyboard is extremely unreliable inside Finale, and today even playback volume became quirky. There’s an upgrade, but I can’t apply it until Christmas Carol is over in case it borks everything, which is what happened several upgrades ago.)
Oh well.
Here’s “Easier Piece #5” as of today: mp3 (only about 30 seconds of music; the rest is blank measures that I will fill up. With genius.)
<ETA> Here’s what I like about the piece so far: I like the way that the moving parts feel as if they are not bound by a specific meter. It sounds like it’s trying to be a waltz, but the bass line won’t cooperate. I like the almost clichéd fillip at the end of the main melody. I like the potential of the second theme, and the work I’ve done on the piece since posting this morning leads me to believe that it will end up as a sonata allegro. More later.
Blogging
Christmas Carol: Overture!
Here’s something you haven’t heard in nearly fifteen years: the Overture to Christmas Carol.
You may recall that last year, I labored for half a year to reconstitute the score for a small ensemble which never materialized. None of the original computer/MIDI files existed any more, and so I had to work from my original handwritten piano score. This was not a problem. But the overture was never written down—I composed it directly in the computer using the sequencing software EZ•Vision (which no longer exists.)
I was going to have to recompose the piece from the ground up, although I had a pretty firm idea that it consisted of the Christmas Waltz, 20 Questions, and People Like Us. Since the music I wrote last year never got used, I was gratified that I didn’t put the effort into the overture.
This year, though, I wanted my overture back. I cobbled together the opening by copy/pasting the Christmas Waltz, then pieced together the 20 Questions sequence—and then I just laid it to the side and ignored it for months. This week, though, since we open a week from tonight, I figured I’d better get in there and finish it.[1]
Today, I opened it up and began working, and by lunch I was mostly finished. Bits of “A Reason for Laughter” sneaked in, and I quite like that section—it’s definitely my recent style as opposed to my 20-something self. The final half is a neat orchestration of the “People Like Us” canon, and while it resembles what I remember from 20 years ago it, too, is more of my recent style.
The rest of today has been Successive Approximation all the way, as I tweaked and added and subtracted—then after premiering it at tonight’s rehearsal, I heard tons more that needed fixing. Tomorrow, I’ll probably futz with it again, but for the moment, Behold! An Overture!
Christmas Carol Overture | mp3
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[1] The other impetus was that I discovered yesterday that I have to gear up and supervise the construction of almost all the gowns in the show. In a week.
Random photos from the labyrinth
Fall is here.
This isn’t autumnal color—ivy is evergreen. But it’s still striking.
We recently cleaned out and culled our years of Halloween decorations. This came to live in the labyrinth.
All the maple leaves are from the neighbor’s yard. The trees themselves are spectacular, especially in afternoon light.
I’ll say it forever: my labyrinth is a sacred space.
Lichtenbergianism: some progress
I have been surprised at my assiduity in writing Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.
Here you can see that I have all that I need:
- computer
- coffee
- reference works1
- Assistive Feline™
- new agey Pandora station (not shown)
Thus girded, I have written and written and written. If I have a goal of 25,000 words total, I am 370 words short of being halfway there.
I know this because Scrivener, the authoring software I’m using, allows me to track my progress. I’ve set a putative deadline of April 12, 2016, which is totally arbitrary of course, but the fun thing is that if I click the little “calculate session goal from deadline” thingie, then I only have to write like 130 words a day. Pfft. After allowing myself to revel in the idea that this is a really doable goal even for a Lichtenbergian, I turned it off and went back to a still-modest 500 words/day.
Still, today I knocked out more than 800 words, and that’s not bad at all. I may be up to 1,000 by the end of the day, should I decide to keep writing rather than making cookies for Fuzzy Labyrinth holiday sales. Or reading more on The Gift, an influential piece of work on my thoughts about creativity.
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[1] I begin to realize the daunting task ahead of me in obtaining permission, even in a research setting, to use other people’s work in mine, particularly Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorisms as translated by R. J. Hollingdale.
Dionysian entropy
Lichtenbergianism: a realization
I was mulling it over and thinking that I want Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy to be a relatively short book. I mean, it’s not a weighty philosophy to begin with, so I’m thinking it ought to be about the same length as Art & Fear.
So this afternoon I took my copy of Art & Fear out to the labyrinth to do a quick estimation of the word count and came up with about 34,000 words.
Well.
I already have 9,800 words just from transcribing my notes from the Waste Book [Precept #4]. Without even getting started, really, I’m anywhere from a quarter to a third of the way to my goal.
Cool.