a change in program

Ah, seems it has been far too long. I apologize. since my last post i struggled through borrowing money to pay bills, had an amazing birthday which included my bff Chris flying out for the weekend (always great to see her), getting offered a couple classes at KCKCC (one is set, one might not reach the minimum, and the third, well, i haven't heard from that area coordinator as of yet. so, i'll teach between 1-3 classes. heh), getting a scoring gig for a civil war musical (which the guy paid his deposit immediately. a very pleasant surprise), and, finally, got my website up and running.

visit www.johnchittum.com

have i written any music? well...no. and that's a large problem. a gigantic problem.

I'm way behind. One piece, tentatively titled Black Paper Moon (I am doing a series of pieces named using English lyrics from J-Rock songs) for Trombone and Organ, is due ASAP. i have several parts sketched, the overall idea, energy, form (poor word), and style figured out. it's just notes...but the notes won't come...

Dance of Disillusionment and Despair for Pierrot ensemble, has one movement finished and a second nearly finished. that seems good, except that's only 2 minutes of music. I am thinking of adding a couple instrumental movements...either as singer reading the line and then the instruments playing, or people just reading the lyrics. prolly just having them read the lyrics but not having anything sung. that trick only works once though...maybe twice.

my webpage was all consuming for a couple days. not sure i mentioned it on here before, but i spent a large chunk of the summer trying to learn Drupal. CMS seems like a system that i should really learn, as more and more developers head that direction. But, i had three months of Drupal, and while i learned the terminology (i get that it's based on nodes, and you can have different types of nodes. you can specify different content types beyond what it comes with, blah blah blah), I still don't understand how to get a page up and running. I was able to do some rudimentary work, got a link in place, moved some things around. but, yeah, i gave up.

The main reasons was for the final hiring interview with the Dean of Arts and Humanities at KCKCC, they wanted a full portfolio of anything i would be teaching. One class i may teach is Music and Multimedia which includes rudimentary web-design. Well, since i hadn't made a webpage since, oh, '03 or so, i decided i better do it.

The web has changed so much, but putting together a basic site that at least looks clean is still the same. that sort of surprised me. as did my ability to go in and edit the CSS without screwing it up, edit various html bits as needed (mainly things like meta-tags and sizes).

I have decided to leave this blog here rather than migrate it. I will change how it's pointed (right now it's just a link on the "links" page) but this is staying put. Might as well. Anyway, maybe i'll get cross-talk between the sites. that would be nice..

oh yeah

music.

I should write some

today.

That requires coffee...and possibly, a scone

Been gone FAR too long.

I apologize to all my avid readers (HA!) for being gone so long. I have a glut of material to speak on and will try and catch up.

First a few general happy pieces of news. First off, congrats to Paul Rudy on winning the American Rome Prize. He'll be spending the next year hanging out in Italy. Coincidently, i will not be spending the next year studying with him, which makes me quite sad.

Also, had a successful performance in NYC with my latest piece "It Was Raining" with the fabulous vocalist Sarah E. Fox. We also performed (as a duet, somewhat, heh.) Aphorisms of Futurism by Andrew Seager Cole. It was a fabulous concert and i really hope that Sarah and I can take those couple pieces around a bit.

Now for the sad news: The monitor on my laptop is not happy. At all. Apple wants to charge me something like $1300 to replace the whole thing. I'm not actually 100% positive it needs replace. The way it's acting reminds me of just having a bad connection. I'm going to tear it apart with a friend of mine and see if we can fix it. If not, i found a place that will replace the monitor for $300 plus shipping. Screw you Apple!

That being said, i'm going to do a couple quick posts, mainly just to separate them. The first will be in regards to my recent teaching. I haven't been blogging about it like i should. I have fun adventures but i have been a little...pre-occupied. Still am in some ways.

Now then, with "It Was Raining" finished (for now. It needs MASSIVE revision and programming, but it's gonna sit for awhile.) i have a film score for an animated short. It's about a village of flying hamsters that keep getting attacked by a troll. There is only dialogue during the first 20 seconds or so, and from then on, it's all score. There is also going to be no foley. we decided to do everything in the score. It'll be a fun challenge, especially since i'm doing it 100% electronically.

After that, i'm going to work on a Pierrot ensemble piece. I actually dislike Pierrot ensemble greatly. I think it is mid heavy. I'm definitely going to add some metallophones to the mix to give a little brightness to the mix, as well as specifying a soprano for the vocal part. I'm actually thinking of writing it using "micro-poetry." It's quite the fad at the moment, with published twitters and such. I'm going to talk to some folks i know that do "that writing thing" and see about ways to get tons of submissions. i think it would be a lot of fun to do a contest for it, with the winners getting put into my piece (which is being entered in a competition). It would be a fun form of collaboration, i think.