Monthly Archives: August 2018

Si bheag si mhor

Posted on by

Today I was thinking that I could ask fellow students at HCC to participate in the “Last of the 300 Worlds” project (LOT300W). For certain planets I could ask them for guided improvisation. (If the other students help me come up with themes, how do I give them proper credit? Ask Prof. )

I was thinking about which planets I would want guided improvisation, and which ones would I want to be mine, all mine. There are three — the intro / outro (because this is a story that I am telling, a story from my point of view), the Gervays (because they are my buddies, my favorites) and my Home Planet. Note that I have a Home, it is destroyed unexpectedly, and I find a Second Home which is in some ways more beautiful. But this time I know that the destruction is coming, and then both that home and the rest of the universe are lost.

I talked somewhere else about for me (and unlike Lisbeth Scott), music is a form of building rather than a form of self-revelation. But in the case of the Home Planet theme, I will be expressing something personal.

So I was worrying. How in the world will I be able to come up with a theme that is so beautiful and yet so heartrending? I could just picture being at the end of the school year with ONE more theme to do and it is THAT one, and I am stuck. Painted myself into a corner! Argh!!

Then the thought came “Si Bheag Si Mhor”. Pronounced “she beg she more”, this is an Irish tune, probably the first one I learned — on my first bamboo flute. If I’m remembering right,  I was working my way through “100 Best Tunes for the Pennywhistle” — and I came to that one. I heard the first phrase and suddenly it was as if I had known the tune from another life. I didn’t recognize it, more like it fit into my heart like a key into a lock.

Maybe this would be good for my Home Planet theme. Am I allowed to use it? I suppose the copyright has elapsed? When Holst created his Planet suite, the Jupiter theme is like a folk-song. Was it his own tune or did he adapt it?

I also thought that I could use phrases from literal bird calls. I have a wonderful recording that I made of a mockingbird singing late at night. Unfortunately the recording has some traffic noise (hard to avoid here, even at 2 am), but if I was just borrowing from the mockingbird, that wouldn’t matter.

Borrowing? Stealing?

Dr. Greenberg says “If you’re going to steal, steal from the best”

Anyway — now I have some raw material for the most personal part of LOT300W. I don’t have to worry about racking my brains at 2 am during finals week.

Reducing anxiety by being “meta”

Posted on by

This summer I worked on a diet and fitness program based on Intermittent Fasting. It was a huge change from my regular habits. Usually I eat as a transitional activity. Come home from a stressful doctor appointment? Grab a snack. Finish the dishes and the next thing to do is clean the aviary? Get something to eat to “fortify” myself. Time to edit the newsletter? Definitely gotta eat something first. The responsibility I’m anxious about can’t nag at me if I’m eating something.

The way I got around this habit was to WRITE ABOUT how I was feeling during those times. I called it my “Journal of Whining” and I filled 5 spiral bound notebooks this summer.

Yesterday I drove to HCC by myself for the first time. I knew I was going to be terrified. Previously I had made the trip with my son riding shotgun, and talking to him took my mind off the fear. Yesterday I had the brilliant idea to bring my digital recorder along with me, and spend the whole trip narrating how I felt at any given time. “I’m scared. I’m sooooo scared. I have to pee. Can I just turn around and go home? Oh sh-t I nearly missed that stop sign”.

It worked quite well — my own narration was so over-the-top that I cracked myself up. And “look out for the speed bump” is useful self-talk.

This led to another idea. My plan is to have a chunk of composing work done every two weeks. (That’s why this blog now has 9 pages — one for each 2-week period this semester.) My brilliant idea was to make a short video every 2 weeks talking about what I had accomplished during that period of time. Narrate my own creative process! I got very excited about this and wrote a script for episode 1, and sketched out a script for episode 2.

For  some reason, being meta about this — not just composing, but talking about the process of composing — was helpful to my attitude. The thought of spending 2 weeks beating my head against the wall is terrifying. Talking about the process of beating my head against the wall could be hilarious.

I’m also getting excited about the idea of narrating something. I will be starting voice lessons next week. It would be cool to work on my speaking voice as well as my singing voice.

I wish I could sound like this, but there’s only one Emily Reese!

A Color wheel of themes

Posted on by

The way my brain works, it helps to have what I’m working on sitting out where I can see it. Otherwise I get distracted and forget! I had the idea that I could have some kind of visual reminder of my composing project hanging on the wall, and I could stick post-it notes on it.

I arranged those 12 images (representing the 12 themes) around a color wheel. This made me realize that just as a color wheel has a range of color values (yellow is the “lightest” and blue violet is the “darkest”), a suite of compositions would have a lowest point and a highest point. I don’t think that the way I have the music themes arranged around the color wheel necessarily corresponds to the color values. In other words, I don’t think that the Empty Planet theme has to be the “darkest” and the Desert Planet theme has to be the “lightest”. But I should consider “how light does it get, how dark does it get” and arrange everything between those two extremes.

I have often thought about this while watching episodes of Doctor Who. The actor Peter Capaldi has such a range of emotions and I’m sure they sat down at the beginning of the season to sketch out “this scene is when you’re going to be in the most pain. This scene is when you experience the most joy. This is when you’re the most flat, bored, withdrawn, lethargic”.

One of my professors at HCC yesterday talked about “character development” in program music — does the music capture a character’s personality? Some composers do this especially well. She mentioned Ennio Morricone — a name I had not heard before. Though I did recognize this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1PfrmCGFnk

 

 

Current snapshot of goals

Posted on by

While talking to Mentor # 1 yesterday I had an opportunity to describe the composition project I would like to work on this year.

  • A suite of compositions
  • Inspired by the moods / virtual environments of a video game
  • The game is called “No Man’s Sky” and is a planet exploration game
  • In the original version of the game, the player is a solitary space traveler
  • Recently the game was updated to include multiple players
  • …which meant that the previous universe was re-written (destroyed)
  • I now have a limited amount of footage to draw from
  • This puts helpful limits on the project.
  • Create 12 themes expressing different kinds of planets and situations
  • ex. dangerous planet, beautiful planet, travel theme, farewell theme
  • Use these themes (motifs) as a basis for compositions
  • Compositions to include examples of things I’m learning about
  • such as monophony, polyphony, chamber group, orchestra
  • Write the manuscript notation of each composition (in Finale)
  • Record  and mix each composition using electronic instruments
  • Also record in “stem” form (keeping individual tracks separate)
  • This is a technique for video game soundtracks and film scores
  • NEXT year, record live instruments and voices?

Work in Progress

Posted on by

Here’s the other half of the Green Room

Cables, Tascam Audio Interface, small microphone, big microphone, flash cards of the bass clef and chord inversions, 2 computers (old and new), Korg Karma (on the new stand!). Also Bonnie the dog, and a trash can holding a colony of mealworm beetles. The art hanging on the wall is a poster of Earthsea, given to me by another musician friend. I met him during my Irish flute days at Chiff and Fipple.

 

 

My mentors are with me

Posted on by

One side of the Green Room is looking good!

Note that the “still life with bifocals” on the right hand side includes a little angel statue — a gift from my choir director in 2008 — and a tiny picture that says “Jesus Loves Me”. The latter is a gift from a friend who was a big influence on me in high school (and onward). She introduced me to the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and encouraged me to join the choir! The placard has an inscription on the back with the date 1983.

It’s wonderful to be reminded of the ongoing love and encouragement from my musical mentors. I had a two-hour talk with my high school friend yesterday. At the end of the conversation she said a prayer for me, a blessing on this upcoming year. And my other mentor, my choir director, will be back in my weekly routine soon; choir rehearsal resumes next week!

 

 

New Equipment

Posted on by

I have some new equipment on the way. I ordered a long power strip that has the openings aligned and spaced better. Right now the pile of the cables and cords looks like a nest of snakes. I also ordered a rolling cart…

 

to put the Korg Karma on. That thing weighs a ton. With a cart I can roll it to where I need it — ex. to connect it to my computer and record the sounds using Audacity.

Here’s a great description of the beast. I got this one around 2003.

http://www.vintagesynth.com/korg/karma.php

Another piece of equipment I have on the way is a new pair of glasses. I have been avoiding bifocals for 10 years, but because of my upcoming classes I decided it was important to be able to see things distant and close without sliding my glasses up and down my nose (which is what I do currently). The new glasses are “progressives”, which means there is a continuous gradation of focal lengths. My husband says that he likes his; you just have to tilt your chin up and down to find the right area for what you want to do. Another friend said that hers made her nauseated at first. Walking up stairs was especially freaky.

Earlier this summer I went on a trip to Florida and we took a charter boat to go snorkeling. I am very nearsighted (can’t see the E on the eye chart) and would not have been able to see any fish unless they were close enough to bite me. So I took apart one of my old pairs of glasses and super-glued the lenses into the scuba mask. That is how I’m picturing these new progressive glasses. A scuba mask for classes and reading music.

 

Setting the keyboards up

Posted on by

I made good progress setting my keyboards up yesterday. Earlier this year we had all our aviary birds living in my office (the Green Room) while we made renovations in the aviary (a remodeled garage). When I brought the birds in, I packed away all my instruments, cables, power cords, user’s guides, music interface, etc. We moved the birds back out to the aviary in June and the Green Room was cleaned up and ready for our house-sitters to use. But I didn’t unpack the boxes of music equipment til now.

I tried connecting the Fatar 88 key controller to my newest Korg, the Microarranger. This has a wonderful array of patches and “band in a box” type accompaniment settings, and so lightweight you can sit it on your lap, but has very small keys.

When I connected them, sound came out, but I was unable to change the patch. No matter how I manipulated the Microarranger, midi signals from the Fatar only produced sounds from the piano patch. However if I played the Microarranger directly, the different patches were available as usual. This is annoying, but not a big deal. I guess I don’t have the midi input set up properly on the Microarranger.

Next I connected the Fatar to my oldest Korg, a little sound module called the 05R/W.

 

It is a half-size rackmount and we purchased this (and the Fatar) with money we received after my husband’s mom passed away. This was right after I graduated from college (1995) but before my son was born. When I plugged it in and turned everything on, the sounds took me back 23 years.

Cool, part synth part Tardis.

Overtone Series

Posted on by

Dr. Robert Greenberg talked about this in Understanding the Fundamentals of Music and I wanted to learn more about it. Here’s 2 references.

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/quick-tip-the-overtone-series–audio-4672

 

Octaves and 5ths are primal intervals, natural to ancient music. The use of the third became prominent in the Renaissance and with composers such as Palestrina in the 1500s. Bach and his contemporaries began to exploit the 7th in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 9th didn’t become an important chord tone until the time of Wagner in the mid 19th Century, and the extended tones of #11 and 13th weren’t commonly accepted until the music of early 20th century composers like Debussy and Stravinsky.

 

The Wiki article is much more complex — it talks about how the harmonics that are integer divisions of the original string (or column of air) are different from the tuning system we use now (equal temperament). The little numbers above the notes indicate how many cents sharp or flat the integer harmonics are from modern tuning.

 

 

I remember Dr. Greenberg talking about Pythagoras (and his students) experimenting with a monochord and finding the ratios for octaves, perfect fifths, perfect fourths, and major and minor thirds. The Wiki article takes it further.

 

Yow. I wonder if this has applications to music that uses microtonal scales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)

 

 

 

Getting set up

Posted on by

My first day of classes at HCC is on August 27, about 2 weeks from now. I spent time today getting more things set up in my office. I thought of a clever way of displaying my bamboo and PVC flutes that will keep them right at hand and easy to pick up. They are such great instruments to improvise with. I also love my blackwood flutes, but they are very expensive and live in a special cabinet with controlled humidity. Taking them out, applying cork grease, assembling them, then carefully drying them afterward is an involved process. I also have a student model Boehm flute, but I don’t think it’s ‘healthy’ for it to be sitting out all the time either. So it’s great to have the bamboo flutes. Both of mine are by Olwell — a small one in G and a large one in C. I also have a black PVC flute that was made in Ireland, in the traditional key of D.

My blackwood flutes were made by David Copley. There is one headpiece and two bodies. One body is the traditional keyless flute in the key of D; the other is a fully-keyed flute in C. Unfortunately the material under the keys has broken down (eaten by dermestid beetles?) and the keys don’t seal. I need to send the flute back to meet its Maker!

I still have to set up the “piano” in my office. I have an 88 key, weighted keyboard that is more than 20 yrs old. It’s a bit stiff and squeaky but functional. There’s several sound sources I could connect it to using midi cables. The original is a rack mount Korg 05R/W (also 20+ yrs old!). Other options are the Korg Karma and Korg Microarranger.

I also need to clear the random boxes out of here so that I can sit at the piano without tripping on things!