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<\/a><\/p>\nAfter 2021 there was a period of time where it was hard to work on music. We were packing up the house to get ready to move, and I spent hours searching for a new home. Moving took place Summer 2022. Dad died that fall, Mom died 6 months later. Summer 2023 was spent planting the young trees we had brought over from the old house. Christmas 2023 we had a flood in the basement which catalyzed the decision to have a barn built. The barn was conceived that spring and born in late August.<\/p>\n
During the Spring of 2024, I felt like I had enough brain cells left over to start a new music project. The goal was, every morning I would toss 15 dice, and then create something using those notes. Three of the dice are blank, and 12 have the chromatic solfege syllables written on them.<\/p>\n Music notation is still very awkward for me, so I write music down in a kind of hybrid notation on giant sheets of graph paper. Here’s the accumulated work so far!<\/p>\n And here’s the work for the past 2 weeks<\/p>\n It’s compositions 282 through 292. In 2 weeks that’s 11 compositions and 20 pages!<\/p>\n Another idea I had was to go back to Skillshare and see how many classes were available that were taught by my favorite instructor, Jay Allen. I’ve watched many of them already, but I was feeling completionist and wanted to march my way through all those classes, taking notes.<\/p>\n Here’s page 1 of the classes he has available — there’s a total of 9 pages!<\/p>\n The first class I started listening to was one of Jay’s new ones, called “Precomposition: The Secret to Creating Great Music”. It was great to be ‘hanging out’ with Jay again — he’s so chill — the Bob Ross of music theory. Apparently it was a good video to start with, because it started a whole wave of creativity. Because of Jay’s class, I realized that I really wanted to finish my Planet Project. Meanwhile in December, many creative people I follow on Bluesky were posting their “projects of the year”. It was so inspiring to see the results of their persistence. I posted on Bluesky that I wanted to do something similar in 2025. To represent the project in visual form, I created a giant chart<\/p>\n Here’s a schematic of it<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The chart is a place where I can work on many of the things Jay Allen talks about in his Precomposition course, and also helps me keep on track with deadlines.<\/p>\n I talked to my tutor about setting up lessons again. I’m concerned about inundating him with writing the way I did in our lessons several years ago. He teaches at a public school now and his time is limited. I told him that I would hand in 2 written pages and 2 mp3s per lesson, and it would be great if the deadline was on Saturdays at noon — though we can have the online lesson whenever best fits his schedule.<\/p>\n I started work 2 weeks ago and realized that if my turn-in time is Saturday at noon, I sure don’t want to be up at 2 am Friday night pulling things together. So here I am on a Thursday afternoon figuring out what to say for the turn-in date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several years ago I had music lessons (via Zoom) with a friend whom I had met at the community college. We started out working on music theory, and I sent him long pdf documents describing what I had worked on. … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n