take it easy, you're on the right track!

Ah, young composers, and their amazingly long lines and fantastic ideas. wait...i'm one of those composers. lol

Had another meeting with my mentee. Man, this guy has quite the staggering mind. Honestly, anyway that takes on reading ancient philosophy (partly for class and partly because he wants to) and doing "a series of exercises using all 5 forms of species counterpoint, for multiple voices" without being in a theory class is quite astounding. I never had that kind of drive. prolly never will. lol.

Anyway, we were discussing his latest assignment, a clever piece of orchestrational fun. He is to take 4 different percussion parts, two of which must used pitched instruments at some point, and create some sort of theme. Then, develop the theme not through various pitch or rhythmic invention, but through timbre. Ah, orchestration.

Oh course, he came to me with big ideas. "he's my rhythmic ideas. i think i'l use just one." there were three, and, from my basic guess, each one was about 6 or 7 measures long. Yeah a bit long. He drew out his ideas for the melody and accompanying gestures graphically (a fun way to work, i think). and went to elaborate on his ideas.

After awhile, a smile crept over my face. How many times have i done this exact thing! Here's my idea, here are 20 other ideas, each one quite long. and wonderful. and, i will say, his patterns were quite interesting. and his ideas on the melody were interesting...but...

When is there too much? it's a big question i think. I tried to lead him toward making a decision on one line to follow. Then, i offered the simple advice "do a bit less, work within the confines of the idea, and keep it simple."

I think one of the biggest challenges in composition is limiting oneself. It's easy to come up with great ideas...well...easier to come up with great ideas than start with one and turn it into something more. This invention, this development of idea is what separates the greats, ranging through time, from the wannabes. It's why we remember Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg. they new how to do more with a little.

And it's something i struggle with everyday i composer. My last piece, 6 Pieces After Basho, was a giant exercise in restraint. I had limited resources (not quite a full band instrumentation), limited abilities (it was for a HS band playing right around grade 3 literature, not a "dream group."), and decided to limit myself in time (each movement being 1 minute, except the last which went 2, but it's really in two 1 minute parts) and in content (working mainly with 0 2 5, 0 1 5, and 0 2 7 trichords, mostly in inversion). and, honestly, i'm not sure each movement does stand alone perfectly. However, as a whole, the piece, i think, is pretty successful. Maybe not a masterwork, but a pretty good piece. Restraint does wonderful things. And figuring out invention using limited materials can really lead to great things.

My mentee is a quick learner...I pointed out that his first rhythmic idea can really be broken down into two separate ideas, and the rest of it is based almost fully on it. He wasn't sure what i meant, but i illustrated that the first two groupings (3 3 2 and 3 2 2) really made up the whole line (i believe it was 3 3 2 3 2 2 2 3 3 3 2 2 2, though this was about 8 hours ago he showed it to me). So, take the basic units, 3+3+2 and 3+2+2 and create the ideas out of that.

Then, we came to the big part. The professor had given two pages of a piece he had written for percussion quartet as an illustration. I pointed out one other thing. "ya know, it seems like you're thinking of continuous rhythm and lines...what about silence?" we started talking about this and that, and he told me a story about his marching band days when, while playing in the pit (he plays bassoon, which is conducive to marching band. i should tell him about the bassoon solo i once saw in a marching band competition...). they were doing music from Wizard of Oz and the first song was Over the Rainbow (of course). afterwards there was silence, then...BOOM, the percussion erupt into the tornado! He said everyone was surprised and he got a reputation for being the guy that leapt into the air at the gong and really beat the heck outta it.

And i smiled...and looked at him, and said "why was it effective?" and he laughed. "Oh wow, and we came back to it! Because it came from nothing!"

exactly! Silence is a large part of music, and something that is easy to forget about. There doesn't need to be constant motion. in fact, constant motion can wear down the ears. it creates expectation of sound. and music is at least in part playing with expectations. I could go on and on regarding this topic, as it's an interesting psychological/philosophical discussion in what we get out of music, but, suffice it to say, that when you know what's going to happen, every time, it can get boring. When you never know what's going to happen, you're going to stop paying attention. It's about finding the middle ground, fulfilling and denying expectation

and, on that note, i'm going to sleep. "lessons" are a lot of fun, especially since it happens in the afternoon on a day i don't have anything, so we just kinda sit around and talk till we're tired of talking. It generally seems to go a couple hours. lol. maybe not always productive time, but, i guess as long as we're both learning, then it is productive, on some level. Ah, sleep

Oh yeah, i finished my meta-sonnet. I shall post it and a discussion of it later...

missed a day

Well, i missed yesterday.

to sum up the big things yesterday, in advanced analysis, we were working on doing some set theory analysis of Schoenberg Op. 23 No. 2. the wonderfully stimulating assignment for the day had been to find all the [0 1 3], [0 1 4], and [0 3 6] trichords. well, for how much i use some ideas with set theory in my own composition, going through and labeling trichords may be the most mind-numbing exercise i know. I got through about 1 page...maybe...it was painful.

someone, with about 10 minutes remaining, asked the question that so many others had asked before; "What exactly is the point of this?" cause, seriously, what is the point?

Allen Forte would argue, one of the big reasons is to bring an objective approach to musical analysis. Also, it provides the theorist with a huge amount of indisputable evidence. here are 47 different instances of [0 1 3]. the next copious amount is of [0 1 4] and there are 34. therefore, [0 1 3] is the most important trichord.

There are lots of other parts of this, of course. I am being glib. however, the biggest part of it is doing all the analysis, starting with trichords, then tetrachords, then on and on, till you've analyzed every chord.

Now, again, there are portions i am skipping, but, to me, i don't feel like you have to do all that mind-numbing labor to reach the point of a piece. finding out how man [0 1 3]'s there are, doesn't particularly bring more meaning to the piece...to me.

As i've been working in this analysis class, the professor (i have attempted to keep names out of this blog unless its a specific book or article or something. mainly, cause i haven't asked anyone's permission. lol) makes a big deal out of relationships. Honestly, i wasn't sold on it at first, as we went through some early Schoenberg atonality (or pantonality, as he would have liked to call it). now, after stepping back into straight set theory, and wanting to tear my eyes out after an evening, i see the point. It's about finding meaning in pieces, right?

So, as we were discussing some set theory in class, the question of "what goes to what trichord" came up, when looking at a set of 4 notes. of course, the answer is "all trichords that happen during that moment are viable and, in fact, should be recorded." however, it's almost like a koan. for some, they saw "well, there is a three note chord in the LH and a single note in the RH, therefore it's melody and harmony, so the trichord is the LH and the RH is its own thing." i heard "well, but they are all in the same range (Eb Gb Bb in the LH with an A between the Gb an Bb in the RH), so all four notes should be considered a collection and analyzed as such."

so...the koan said to me "John, you care about texture a lot. and not about the written texture of melody/harmony, but the actual sonic landscape created." yeah, i kinda thought that before, but i answered the question off the cuff, at the spur of the moment, not much pre-thought outness (i had skipped the measure...cause it was all crazy and i couldn't find things, and i saw 4 notes and said "screw this." lol). And, i realized the moment i said it, that it was exactly how my perceptions lay.

i'm gonna do my final analysis paper all about texture mapping and finding relationships in a piece solely based on texture. Dunno how yet, but i'll do it.

Also, in forum, the best titles for pieces came out. I shall write "Taste the Rainbow" for Skittles, piano, and percussion. oh yes i will. there were many more, but i'm saving those for a special occasion.

as for today...well...

i didn't do much of anything. lol. i made an AWESOME dinner. Granola encrusted chicken stuffed with creamy swiss cheese, dried cherries, fresh rosemary, garlic, and Parmesan cheese served with angel hair pasta with homemade tomato sauce. AWESOME! and it only took about an hour to prepare. not bad

Other than that, i read an article on neo-Riemannian theory by Richard Cohn. a good friend of mine sent me this after i was discussing with him my framework for creating a cylinder based musical space containing. it was interesting, as i was only passingly familiar with the ideas. It also leads toward a nice way of looking at relationships between notes. starting to see a theme here? lol. it seems to be a big part of theory. :)

anyway, yeah, this cylinder containing a cloud based upon fixed lines from a fixed center point is intriguing. i need to work out the relationships part. how much of a change in pitch is point A to point B when point A and B are 22º apart on the circle, and both equally distant from the center point. yep yep...

Anyway, other than that, i figured out one reason the speakers in my TV were a bit noisy. cheap cable. I changed it with my personal cable (still cheap, but not AS cheap) and it was a lot less noisy. the noise floor is still too high for my taste, but they are 5 watt speakers in a monitor/tv. not exactly super high quality. lol. but good enough for my current movie watching taste.

Also, it's nice that i can still work through these problems. i may be doing it regularly again soon. probably. who knows...

g'night