I finally found the classroom locations. It’s right on the registration page (where you sign up / pay for classes). There’s a scrolling sidebar on the left, and you have to make an additional click to reveal the location.

That is the only place I’ve been able to find it!

If you search online for HCC  + location of classes, first it directs  you to the catalog (which tells you the campus only), then reassuringly says there is a notice in the lobby of each building.

Classroom locations for each class are published in our Schedule of Classes brochure. Specific room numbers are posted in each building lobby on the day of class and can also be found on our daily class schedule for classes that have started.

I had held out hope for the daily class schedule webpage, but I just found out it is for “Continuing Education” only — non credit classes.

I’m just grumbling. Back in the old days you received something in the mail. That you could hold in your hand as you wandered around campus. While clutching your map. IN YOUR HANDS. None of this online stuff.

I remember finding the Physics building on the PSU campus — ALL the way down the N-S road from the dorm, then turn right and go east for a few miles. It took me a very long time before I dared to go diagonally. When I did finally head out into that unknown territory, I found a small Sweetgum tree that had unusual colors in the fall — instead of the usual reds / yellows it turned a sort of magenta-pink. Pinkest tree I had seen before, or since.

Anyway, here I am awake SEVERAL HOURS earlier than usual, just grumbling. I wonder what will be this semester’s Pink Tree.

Pink tree (and other colors too!) available here. I’ve purchased trees through this artisan and they are beautiful.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/253919900/bashful-spring-beaded-wire-tree?ref=listing-shop-header-2

George Walker, first African American composer to win Pulitzer Prize, dies at 96

Dr. Walker, who died Aug. 23 at 96, at a hospital in Montclair, N.J., found limited success as a concert pianist, despite early critical acclaim and support from leading pianists such as Rudolf Serkin, his instructor at Curtis. He said he faced racial discrimination — “a pressure-resistant stone wall” — from managers, talent agencies and orchestras who passed over him for white performers. At the same time, he suffered agonizing stomach pain, ulcer attacks that left him hospitalized for as long as a month. Yet Dr. Walker went on to establish himself as a revered composer, a pathbreaking music teacher and a powerful critic of racial discrimination in classical music. In 1996, he became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his song cycle “Lilacs,” set to stanzas from Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Note — on looking this up — it’s a long poem in free verse, written in 1865. It is an elegy for Lincoln, though he is not mentioned by name in the poem.

One of his best-known works was also his earliest: “Lyric for Strings,”which was written in 1946 as the second movement of his first string quartet. The piece was inspired by the death of his grandmother, a former slave.

With mixed success, he sought to be viewed simply as a pianist-composer, without a racial label attached. When he did begin alluding to jazz standards and spirituals in his work — after attending a 1968 music symposium in Atlanta, where he said he met another black orchestral composer for the first time — he buried the references in atonal pieces that utilized complex time signatures and nontraditional chord progressions.

“He took these simple, elemental melodies and abstracted them so that only someone who knows what to listen for can perceive they’re buried in the fabric of the music,” said his son Gregory Walker, a violinist and former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra in Colorado. “You could think of that as a metaphor for his life. There he is working in this white, classical European idiom and mastering it. But he has a grandmother who was a slave, and is part of [African American] culture.”

Photo from Washington Post — taken in 1996

I needed a shorthand title, like LOTR or ST:TNG or ASOIAF.

Provisional title “Last of the 300 Worlds”

I had taken a long break from No Man’s Sky but when I found out that the game world was wrapping up in July 24th, I jumped back in for the last 2 weeks. “I’m up to 200 and some, why not aim for an even 300.” During this time I recorded about 20 hrs of footage. When I make the final videos I think it would be fine to insert some footage from the previous exploration (ex. if I want to do an episode on ALL the kinds of Gervays), but for the most part I want to rely on, well, the last of the 300 worlds.

It really was a nice survey of planets — I did find several of each type. Also, it was amazing that I FINALLY found a planet that had three of my favorite things on it — lush grasses and plants, wide oceans, and Gervays. Still hard to believe I found one like that; I doubt I will ever find another!

Dr. Greenberg defines music as “sound in time” or “time ordered by sound” — basing this on an earlier definition that included the word “purposeful”. Interesting that Greenberg took “purposeful” out.

The first unit of the course will be about the timbre of different instruments.

He begins by talking about the major classifications of instruments. The first instrument, he said, is the human voice; he won’t go on to discuss it, except to say that other instruments aspire to have its flexibility and expressiveness.

As a potential composer, that made me think about how the timbre of different instruments might remind the listener of different kinds of human voices. Childlike, wheezy-old, raging, crooning, howling at the moon. What kind of person is speaking in this composition? Do they have “friends” with them? Or an argumentative crowd?

“Anthromorphizing” the instrumentation.

Also in this lecture he talks about the bassoon and the contrabassoon; he asks “was there ever an instrument simply called the ‘oon’ ?” Unfortunately no, although at one time there was a tenoroon.

I have spent many hours in the procedurally generated universe of No Man’s Sky. I’ve spent so much time there it’s almost like having spent a month traveling around the US. Like seriously, I’ve logged more than 300 hrs. Kinda scary when you think about it. I’ve filled a terabyte of space on my disk drive with screen capture videos.

About 6 months ago there was a major update. When this happened there were many improvements. However, the update re-wrote the entire universe. My home planet was burned to a cinder; Dawnseas no longer has an ocean, Etienne Rouge is no longer red. Only a few of the planets that I had discovered, named and loved have remained as before. I’m embarrassed to admit, I cried when I saw what had happened to my home world. It’s only pixels. But…I will never be able to go there again!

As of July 24, 2018 there will be a huge update. Rumor has it that there will be a form of multiplayer and even PvP. But I’m pretty sure that the universe will be rewritten from scratch. That means I have only a short while to record footage of my favorite planets.

It also means that when that universe is gone, it is gone. That chapter of the story will close. I will have a finite amount of video footage to draw from. This puts limitations on the project (a good thing) and also gives it an overarching emotional theme. Goodbye Dawnseas, Rosperigosa, Neochadwickia. Goodbye Naguxoisanorca.

https://www.nomanssky.com/2018/05/no-mans-sky-next-multiplayer-and-release-date/

OK, so if I’m going to do an independent project totally on my own, I can take it in the exact direction I want rather than trying to meet someone else’s standards. Which is kind of a shame, because trying to meet standards & goals outside of my comfort zone could be a really good thing.

The main thing I’m interested in now is music for video games and for other virtual environments (ex. background music for a virtual tour of an architectural building still in the planning phase). One of the different things about this kind of composition is the use of “stems”. You submit not only the finished piece but also its building blocks (the bass line, the melody line, the weird sci-fi sound effects line) which can be used by the game designer at will — like toppings on a pizza. Here layer parts one, two and three; here just one, here pile them all on.

In game design this is important because the software can be programmed to react to what the player is doing and increase the intensity of the music by using more of the stems layered together. (“Player approaches monster, is attacked and retreats; cue ‘Run Like Hell’ theme”.)

I have been working on my own, posting videos on Youtube. Eight of the videos take place in the planet exploration game of “No Man’s Sky”. It would be a great project to write some additional music to capture the mood of these planetary environments, and also take the compositions I’ve already written and work with them; break them down into stems, put them in official music notation. This will be a lot of work because when I mixed the songs last year I blended all the parts — I don’t have the individual stems anymore! I’ll have to re-create them. Also, I dread working with Finale. I have done it but believe me I would much rather eat kale. Raw kale. Tough raw kale. Kale doesn’t make me beat my head on the desk.

Another project I’ve started (but haven’t posted any examples of yet) are videos that take place in the medieval fantasy world of “Dark Souls”. For these I would like to use music from the repertoire but arranged for synth (by synth I mean any electronic reproduction of instrument sounds, including the realistic samples used in Garritan Instant Orchestra). One song is based on a MIDI file of Machaut’s “Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure”. I used a different instrument for each voice part and used dynamics to bring one instrument to the foreground, then take it back and bring another forward. This comes under “arrangement” rather than “composition” but it’s also something I want to learn about.

So here we go.

1. Take notes on Emily Reese’s “Top Score” series. React to them.
2. COMPOSE more music — for the sci-fi world of No Man’s Sky
3. Take already composed music and make stems and scores
4. ARRANGE music for the fantasy world of Dark Souls
5. Read Winifred Phillip’s book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music

My “No Man’s Sky” playlist

An interview with Eric Whitacre. I found this interview very moving.

The “Earworm” series of videos by Vox is interesting and entertaining and thoroughly geeky. Here’s the most recent episode.

An article about music composed using “Artificial Intelligence” (AI)

https://www.wired.com/story/music-written-by-artificial-intelligence/

And — I had lost touch with Mike Rugnetta’s work several years ago. I’m excited to discover that he has continued his podcast series, called “Reasonably Sound”. One of the old episodes, called “The Drop”, turned me on to EDM and Paul van Dyk. Now I’m listening to Deadmau5, so that podcast made a big impression!

http://reasonablysound.com/

Here’s my fall curriculum, centered on Music Theory but touching on other topics too.

Main Text
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Music Theory by Michael Miller

Supplemental material
Music Theory Comprehensive 2, 4 taught by Jason Allen through Udemy (behind a paywall)
Understanding the Fundamentals of Music — recorded lectures by Robert Greenberg

One on One Instruction — “Miss Muse”  🙂

Exercises
post summaries here!
analyze music ex. songs from choir in church, folk music ex.  121 Favorite Irish Session Tunes

Also
the occasional “trip down the rabbit hole” on Youtube