I’m feeling more able to focus on music again. This summer we had construction (including some drama when I got reported for not having a permit on part of the project), there were a couple of covid scares, we got ready for electrical work by cleaning out half of the basement and leveling a mountain of dirt. Oh and digging up a banana tree that must have weighed 100 lbs. Then there was the election. A lot of mental energy went into those things.

I’m very grateful for the progressives who are planning, doing research, strategizing, writing articles and posting on social media. I’m exhausted and discouraged though, and I’m coping by sticking my head in the sand. I will get back to keeping an eye on things eventually, but for now it’s nice to pretend that there’s not a train wreck in slow motion happening just a ways down the road.

I’m continuing to work on the morning Random Note Project! Today was # 262. I moved a bunch of pages from a temporary notebook over to the massive D-ring notebook. It now contains exercises 1 through 250 (each of which might take up several pages). It’s cool to think that this project means filling up 3 more of these notebooks and most of a 4th (250 + 250 + 250 + 250 = 1000, and then add 200 more).

Here’s how I have my Composer’s Corner set up. The little cabinet off to the right has pencils, erasers, a straight edge and the dice in the top drawer. Other drawers contain things like midi cables, audio cables, power supplies and headphones. The handy-dandy little Tascam recorder stays right there. Note the special 11″ x 17″ graph paper.

Here’s the Solfege Dice.

Speaking of the piano, this came up in my Facebook Memories recently. It really is wonderful to have a piano. A lot of people grow up with them but I did not, and it still seems surprising to see one sitting there in the living room. My piano teacher at the community college really had to push hard to open my mind to the idea. We just weren’t piano people. “Where would we put one?!” “Don’t you have to get them tuned?” “What if I lose interest?” She came up with an answer to each of these objections.

In the end, buying the piano and meeting my music tutor may have been the best (longest term) results of the time at the community college. Also being introduced to Adam Neely and other music YouTubers. And I suppose the time spent generating a video every 2 weeks; what a great example of picking a project and learning, while doing a very awkward job of it.

I’m still working on the Morning Noodle project. A few days ago I organized and labeled the pages; I’m up to 59. I don’t generate a page every day; some days just half a page, other days more than a page. I sit at the piano, toss the solfege dice, see what I can do with it, and work at it til I get restless.

My usual approach is to take the random notes in order and group them into chords. Lots of suspendeds and chord extensions! I play slowly, because I don’t know my way around a keyboard well. For several days this past week I felt bored with what I was coming up with (“It all sounds the same”) so I added a complication by treating the string of random notes as a melody, and rolling a separate die for the note durations. This particular die is a D60. It’s huge (larger than a pingpong ball). and solid metal. The way I’m calculating note values is — 60 is a whole note, 30 is a half note, 15 is a quarter note. 20 is a dotted quarter and 40 is a dotted half. I guess I could say 8 is an eighth note and 4 is a 16th note, but right now I don’t want to get that crazy — I’m just rounding the numbers up or down. Thursday when I did this I wound up with a melody in 12/8, which I thought was cool. Not a meter I normally work in. Yesterday it was in 4/4 and sort of ponderous and lumpy, so instead of treating it as a melody I used it as a baseline for chords — throwing out anything I didn’t like. It’s as if I’m rounding off the edges. I’m sure someone like Adam Maness could take even the oddball notes and metric intervals and make something interesting out of it!

Today I’m having trouble focusing. I’m too tired to roll the D60 and figuring out note durations. Back to the easy route of taking groups of notes and making clustery chords. I got 3 chords then went off on a tangent. If this had been a conversation it’s like you were talking about the weather and that reminded me of something and I started talking about a dream I had. It would be rude if I treated you that way, and somehow it seems rude to today’s random notes to treat them that way too. I should respect them and let them say what they have to say! If this were a homework assignment I had to hand in — if I had to compare my work to my classmates’ efforts — I would be trying much harder today. My desire for recognition and praise would motivate me. Even more so if someone said “hey, that’s cool, can I add a countermelody to that” and it became a group effort.

Working on my own without a class to check in with and get energy from, without a teacher for me to entertain…is its own kind of struggle. I think if Jay Allen were here he would encourage me to take the digression. In one of his Skillshare lectures he demonstrated a technique where he took some random notes, played them in a canon against themselves, and listened for anything interesting that emerged. “I kinda like that, now lets transpose it…” A very gentle and exploratory approach. And I think Adam Maness would say that simply sitting at the piano and playing what I hear in my head is a good exercise.

The Power of Habit author would say that simply sitting at the piano the same time every day is a good exercise.

It’s hard to focus today, I’m tired, not feeling very imaginative — well — I was outside in the fresh air for several hours yesterday planting trees! I didn’t think it was very hard work at the time. We were moving slowly and it was just 3 little trees. The weather was exhilarating — brilliant sun, breezy, and just on the boundary of being warm enough to take off a sweater. Every few minutes the sweet scent of the neighbor’s invasive wisteria would waft across the street. I was digging the final hole and backfilling it with compost as the sun was setting. OK, I give myself permission to be tired today lol.

My “morning noodles” project is going well! I’ve only missed a few days, and there are other days when I produce more than one page of noodling. Lately I have been tossing the solfege dice and working with whatever RNGsus gives me.  It’s a set of 15 blank D12 dice. On 12 of them I wrote the solfege syllables, and 3 of them I left blank.

Why solfege dice instead of dice already marked with the notes of the scale? Well, someday I hope to say “alright, today I’m thinking in a different key” instead of orienting myself with the key of C all the time.

The 3 blank dice are often useful; they usually break the 12 random notes into nice phrases. For example, this morning I got

fi fa la (blank) fi di si mi ri li fa la (blank) li

I started out by thinking of it as [F# F A]   [F# C# G# E, D# A# F A]  [Bb]. Then I realized, I could think of it as in the key of Bb minor, with just 2 “spicy notes”,  E and A. That would take advantage of the fact that I tossed a Bb there at the end, all set apart by itself.

I HATE thinking in keys with multiple “black notes”. Starting at the top of the circle of 5ths I’m OK with the top, a little to the right and a little to the left. No more than a quarter circle either way. So when I saw F# C# G# E, right away I was thinking an E chord shell with extensions, or some kind of F# chord. How could that fit with the Bb at the end? F# can’t exist in the same key with Bb!!! — uh, yes it can, if it’s Bb minor.

The chords in Bb minor are

Bb minor

C minor b5

Db major

Eb minor

F minor

F# major (whaaaaat??) — actually Gb major

Ab major

 

That means that using E instead of Eb is a tritone (or sharp 11th), one of my favorite chords. The A is less weird — it’s the major seventh.

I moved the phrases around so I currently have

Eb Bb  F A,  Gb Db Ab E  (down up down, down up down)

Eb Bb F A, ….Bb  (up down up, up)

Yes it’s March 5th already. But I have been Marching Forth.

I’ve been ordering parts for my new PC one item at a time, in case Amazon delivery had a problem. In the past I’ve ordered multiple items from Amazon, and if one of the group doesn’t arrive and everything else does, it’s complicated to clear up. As a result of the daily packages it’s been like the 12 days of Christmas around here. (On the 1st day of Christmas my true love gave to me, 64 gig of DDR5…)

I still haven’t ordered the storage — solid state drives (what types? my motherboard wants 2 different kinds), hard disk drive (“spinner disk”), external storage for backup? Part of me wants to get a NAS* “because then I could share projects between computers”. My computer tech suggests not buying things until it’s clear that I need them. Ok, yeah, but…having the fancier version makes me feel important, like I’m taking my work seriously, like my work IS important. It’s motivating and empowering. On the other hand, I don’t want to irritate my computer tech.

(*) There was a video recently where the narrator was explaining why he didn’t need an ass, there wasn’t really a situation where he would use an ass, he might get an ass later. At least, that’s what it sounded like he was saying. 😉 So the question is, do I need an ass now, or should I wait, maybe get an ass when they go on sale?

Meanwhile — the Morning Noodles —

I haven’t photographed and stored away the last 3 noodles. There have been Morning Disturbances that interfered with the Morning Noodles. For example, one morning I got a phone call from Matt the Concrete guy, could he come by in 20 min?

For all 3 of these days I’ve played experimental chords at the piano and have written down the chord spellings, but I did not finish filling up the pages. Today my other family members went out to eat and I had the house to myself for an hour. Instead of finishing the Noodle page, I played the prologue of my planet suite at full volume.

At some point I’m going to sit down with each page and translate the chord spellings into music notation. I guess that means right now I have 3 servings of leftover Noodles.

I want to get back to Finale. Here’s where I left off

When I think of video game composers, Curtis Schweitzer is the one I’d most like to learn more about. Here’s an interview with him

https://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1248

House drum pattern. This guy is an accidental discovery via Youtube shorts

Useful for making an under-the-desk keyboard tray for MIDI controllers

RMSAET Sliding Keyboard Drawer Tray Hardware 12/14/16/18 inches Slides Heavy Duty Metal Slides Keyboard Slides Mounting Accessories/Ideal for Under Desk Kitchen Cabinet Drawer (12 inches, Black)

The 8Bit Music Theory playlist. I want to work my way through the whole thing!!!

By way of Andrew Huang: here is a guy who makes free plugins, supported by Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/airwindows

http://www.metorchestramusicians.org/blog/2018/9/21/on-drawing-and-music

After internalizing all of these separate qualities, the illustrator won’t draw any one particular mushroom, but the essence of that mushroom, and translate it into his or her interpretation, style, and even emotional response in a way that most people can understand.

You see what I’m getting to now: Isn’t this exactly what musicians do? Isn’t it why computer generated music will never replace the interpretation of a piece by flesh and blood musicians ? The tempo might not be as stable as one generated by a Macintosh, the pitch might vary slightly, but the result is not about ”photographic” rendering of a score. It’s about deconstructing and reimagining in real time the essence of what the composer was trying to express.

I found a whole series of Ayrton’s cartoons / paintings here  http://www.metorchestramusicians.org/cartoons/

Here is the artist’s own page http://www.emmanuelleayrton.com/the-met-orchestra-project/

Here’s an extended quote from the audio course Understanding the Fundamentals of Music by Robert Greenberg, lecture 1.

Music is a language; a mode of sonic communication through which a tremendous amount of information of all sorts — aesthetic, stylistic, emotional and so forth– can be transferred with an ease that belies its complexity. […] I would suggest that music is the ultimate language — a mega language — a language in which our hard-wired proclivities to use successions of pitches and sounds to communicate are exaggerated, intensified, and codified into a sonic experience capable of infinitely more expressive depth and nuance than mere words alone. […] The great mid-century composer, Roger Sessions (who was the teacher of my teacher, a gentleman named Andrew Imbrie) said that music is the “controlled movement of sound in time”. Although we respectfully ask, “Controlled by whom?” Our working definition will draw on what is best from Sessions’ definition. Music is sound in time — or, if you prefer — time ordered by sound. That’s it! And that’s enough. That definition isolates the two essential aspects of music — sound and time — without any qualifications.

Since I am pouring my heart out this morning, here are some observations on my piano lessons.

I love my piano instructor. She reminds me so much of my choir director. High standards; patient, but a little ascerbic. Here is a difference, though. When my choir director would say “Ladies, you sound like wimpy little girls. I need a strong tone”, I knew exactly what to do. With piano — I play something and finally manage to get through it with minimal stumbling — my teacher says “Good. But all I could hear was the left hand” — I literally CAN NOT do it. My left hand isn’t coordinated enough to control the pressure. When I try to touch the keys lightly, I often produce no sound at all. I have a long, long way to go before my piano experiences are anything like my choir experiences.

Here are some of the Big Revelations I’ve gotten from lessons so far —

• sitting like a tripod formed by legs and “sit bones” — then move from the waist. LLLLLEAN to the right or left to reach the higher / lower notes of the piano. DO NOT scoot with your butt on the piano bench, DO NOT sit on a chair with rolling wheels while you practice.
• lifting the hands between phrases. Do not treat the piano like a typewriter.
• If you are playing equally forcefully with both hands, the left hand will overwhelm the right because the piano strings are longer and thicker. Bring out the melody even if it travels from one hand to the other.
• Sharp and flat key signatures are no more dangerous than the other keys. Get to know them. They will not bite you. Well, they may “bite” (when you miss a black key) but it’s not a poisonous bite. Recover and move on.
• If you are playing and something starts to hurt, you are doing something wrong. It shouldn’t hurt.
• The “Bach boys” are fascinating — they lived during a small slice of music history during which many changes were made. (This was an eye-opener for me because all my music history comes from the audio courses of Dr. Robert Greenberg. There’s no course on the Bach Boys.)