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.

so

Wrote a bit the last 2 days. I'm afraid mvt 3 is sounding too much like mvt 1 and 2. gotta find ways to spice it up a bit more.

The coldest part of the winter seems to be over here in KC. good thing, when i moved here, it was running down to 0 and below with wind chills hitting in the -20s. not cool at all.

I'm writing more than i have in quite a while. tonight, i don't have very good words for it. I have realized, as i think i mentioned before, my style is reminiscent of Schoenberg's atonal settings, pre-serialism. Like Pierrot Lunaire. There's a lot of motivic development.

Motive...it's an interesting word. yesterday in class, my professor asked "there's a word i've been avoiding in our talks about Schoenberg...i'm sure you all have figured out which." My mind popped to "motive" just as someone said it in the front of the class. "Yes, that's right. It's such a loaded word, isn't it? we think of Beethoven, and the 5th symphony. We think of Brahms. We think of tonality. Is there another good word for this?"

my brain popped to "set" but, at the same time, i think that's loaded almost too far in the opposite sense. Schoenberg, till the end, no matter what i try to say to myself differently, still held to a lot of romantic writing. It wasn't the cold serialism of, say, Pierre Boulez or Babbitt. There's was a romantic feel to it.

It's funny. I never hesitate to say that i use "motivic invention" and i write mainly using "short motives" and then messing with them as much as possible. and my harmonic language is, often times, quite atonal. and yet, i was hesitant to say Schoenberg wrote "motivically." It's interesting, these stigmas attached to terms.

I received Korngold's "Die Tote Stadt" in the mail today from Netflix. I look forward to watching it. I was going to tonight, but the night slipped away from me, i guess. I will watch it tomorrow, then.