I find it hard to keep myself honest with the little things when I compose. This is especially true about dynamics and articulation markings. I feel like it's in the same category as keeping my financial stuff in order. It's all well and good to know the ballpark ideas, but when it's tax time, you'll wish you had it all written down already.

And, of course, I then swear that next time it'll be different.

Rock is awesome...

...and it is awesome like that awesome movie you saw and then bought. Like, you want to watch it again and again because it will do that awesome thing and you will feel awesome along with it. Why not own that little slice of glory? It'll be yours after that.

Sent from my not-at-all soundproof studio.

Less/More

From Greg Sandow's blog:

Ben Verdery, who teaches guitar at the Yale School of Music [...] Ben wants to know which guitarists auditioning for the school have real musical imagination, so he asked a Yale composer to write an audition piece for auditioners to play -- a piece with all the notes written down, but no expressive markings at all (no tempo markings, no dynamics, no articulations). The students had to decide for themselves how the piece should go. This is a brilliant idea, and Ben tells me it worked out just the way he hoped. It weeded out the students who play stunningly -- as long as someone else tells them how to play.

Things are really changing in the music world. When I was writing my first piece ever, a string quartet in high school, the pro players told me flat out that it was better to put much more information in a piece, telling a performer exactly the way it should be.

The above situation isn't exactly equivalent; those players are auditioning, not performing "for real." But the idea that a performer should be judged on something other than an ability to follow the instructions and that this is being practiced at Yale show that something is changing.

In my own music, I'm finding a pull towards more improvisation. I love doing it myself. God only knows how many good ideas I could have used in other places have floated up and away while I hacked at the keyboard. But screw what Shostakovich said (or may have said) about improvisation and composing -- it's a fun thing to do. Why shouldn't performers have the same sort of fun?

Creating things isn't actually all that easy if you think about it too much, it turns out. I've been behind on a handful of things, so I'm trying to restart. Ah the story of so many things. Every minute is a restarting, so actually by procrastinating I'm participating in the rest of the universe.

But I did make a tumblr. That I am not sure I want to share yet.

Check back in later and I may tell you why I'm cagey. MAYBE!

It's a small world, but I live in it

What did I do when I saw that David Lang had responded to a comment I wrote on Greg Sandow's blog?

I squealed.

When I regain composure, I hope to write something more in depth about my thoughts. Given my current rate of composure, that may take a bit.


ps--all puns intended

I needed to review what was done on the Horace piece. Luckily, two friends who are fantastic singers were able to spend an hour hacking through the first stanza. It was great to have people so good working on the project, even at this early stage. I've got a good feeling about where it'll go next.

For the last week, I've been thinking a ton about Modest Mouse. The album This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About was a kind of re-entry back into rock for me, back in 1998. Listening to it I realized how many shifting tones there are. It's kind of a Modest Mouse thing still--guitar lines with a whammy bar motion. But they really are all over this record, more than the recordings that came afterwards. They get described frequently as "angular" but there's a fluidity there that's really intriguing. I'm going to try to plug some of the tracks into Ableton Live and see if I can't make some nice overlaps. It'll be a fun way to revisit 10 years ago.

I guess it helps that we're up in Boston for the weekend.

All Congratulations

MFAs are scary things. They are frequently expensive and the benefits of getting them aren't as immediate as a law degree (for example). But if you approach the work with the right frame of mind, there seems to be an extraordinary amount of development that can happen. Who knew that if you put money in, getting education in exchange, you tend to spend more effort working on the art?

Congratulations to my Old Ball&Chain. You made it! You're now a certified artist.

Looks like I might be next, right?