Practice the gesture of rushing in this way:
Decide to do something. Then, do it considerably more quickly than you are used to. Play right up to, but not over, the edge of changing what-you're-doing and changing how-you're-doing-it.
Yes, this is a game of language and description naming. If you are "drinking some komboucha" so quickly that you end up actually "spilling komboucha all over your beard", you're over the line. But if you're "emptying a cup of komboucha", this is fine, though it may create the task "suck komboucha out of your shirt" moments later.
Don't worry too much about actual efficiency yet, just the gesture of rushing.
Clean your room this way!
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Friday, January 4, 2008
meta-assignment: make punch cards
Many possible assignments and challenges, including the first vocal stretch, require an interaction with another. It is maybe easier to interact anomalously with strangers who don't have your track record. These situations take time and pretense to create, and may not benefit from constraining to one day. Therefore:
Make activities for interactions with strangers into punch cards. Each time you perform within the constraints of the assignment, punch the card.
Make activities for interactions with strangers into punch cards. Each time you perform within the constraints of the assignment, punch the card.
2007 composition review
Compositionally I live in a land of many more possibilities than manifest themselves. I keep track of ideas on a personal wiki in my computer, which doesn't date the changes I make. So it's very strange to try and go back through the year and imagine what imaginative mindset I was in, when all I have left are the entrails
December 2006 was dominated by "onward", a 17-tone march for 17-tone pianos, eight hands. The result was not disastrous but I remember being embarrassed. I went home for weeks and schemed unsuccessfully for a winter concert of me and Tommy Scheurich - his bassoon-viola serial duo, my whatever I could pull together with my udderbot and laptop. I had brought home, for the second year in a row, a paper I hadn't finished--uggh. I asked for conduit tubing for Xmas, in hopes of making a 31-tone tubulon, and received about 100 feet of it which I still haven't done anything with!
Back at Rice mid January, I had a fancy new plan which included writing pieces for composition competitions, starting with a brass sextet, and a commission-like piece for the Attacca percussion trio (Rice graduates), both of which I started vigorously in my brand new staff paper book of 512 pages, and neither of which I got past the first page. Deadlines came and went...
February was eaten up by performances on my colleagues' master's recitals (much fun) and writing music for BakerShake's production of Much Ado Over Nothing, particularly a tango setting of John Donne's "Woman's Constancy." Getting that actually performed by the quasi-musical stage band was a daunting feat that included teaching accordion to a quasi-pianist.
Meanwhile I was excitedly preparing for a trip to London to go to their Microfest and also to meet with Musical Instrument Technology people about instrument building and the udderbot. That happened in the beginning of March, and that was wonderful. I met Donald Bousted and James Wyness and Chris Bryan and Stephen Altoft and Lee Ferguson, all of whom I hope to see again and collaborate with sometime. Stephen is collecting two-page pieces for 19-tone trumpet solo, and Donald continues to organize Microfests and Wild Dog microtonal multimedia extravaganzas.
When I got back, my recital was less than two months away and I was panicking. Two intended pieces to write that never even got started were the Hoogie Boogie for 16-tone player piano (which has been hanging over my head for years, and I think I'll complete this year), and a 5-bass-clarinet quintet (wow what a sound, I imagine). I began work on Udderbot Counterpoint for 9 recorded and 1 live udderbot, slotting it into a March 19 Composers Forum concert to move it along, but my self-agonizing procrastinatory process yielded a two-minute abortion that I performed anyway.
I successfully completed two pieces in time for my friday April 13 "Señor Recital": the 31-tone Orwellian Spiral Canon No. 1: Getting Started on a text by Annie Dillard (without permission, otherwise I'd be performing the heck out of it), and a spacious 17-tone 6-minute piano-and-voice setting of a text by Troy Suben:
I did complete a third piece, but I won't call it successful: Bonnie Brae at Midnight was a graphic/text score composition/improvisation for the 5 composers living at 1618 Bonnie Brae at that time; the score mostly specified which of the fifty-something instruments, sitting in a pile, we were to play in which order.
But no room to breathe there: on to an electronic music studio concert less than a week later, for another performance of Getting Started tacked on, as well as an utter technical disaster of a 31-autotuner I had built in Kyma. I hadn't had time to actually write any music, or ensure that the sounds produced by the violin and bass wouldn't be completely unlistenable. Yes, that might be the height of my personal embarrassment for 2007.
Oh, also Jan. and Feb. I was finishing up my string quartet from 2005 and titling it "stuck" and courting string quartets, which you really have to do more in advance than the entire length of my timetable allows. It was a week before my recital and I didn't have a violist. I guess I should send that to some quartets with ample time to rehearse sometime this year.
After that, organizing the 17-tone piano project phase Three concert in less than a month happened. What a glorious mess that process was!
Tons and tons of exciting thinking over the summer, with not much music pieces to show for it. For the first time I felt free from defining myself as strictly "composer."
"Noodles adorno foucault," an improvised sketch for autotuned voices, was recorded in a flash and well loved by everyone; I'm now considering an album or set of pieces that use that sound world.
Trying to write a 19-tone pianos and udderbot piece from a Minneapolis without any keyboard proved impossible, as did mustering up the guts to finish it once moved into Urbana. Still I attended the Chicago concert in October and deliciously met and listened to George Secor, Aaron K. Johnson, Chris Bailey, Easley Blackwood, Joel Mandelbaum, and that one student whose name and email I shouldn't have lost.
The fall was dominated by worrying about money and designing society. Unfortunately we're not at the point of having designed a society where these are the same thing. Many small compositions were made, sometimes in collaboration with others, for various assignments. I do intend to collect these from myself and others into an archive. I started thinking seriously about hocket, and more generally Interpoint, as a point of departure.
November at I-Park sparked a renewed set of hopeful projects, all begun but none completed there: microtonal utopian (false-statement) rounds, "vocal alternations", a bass clef 31-tone method book revisited, more composing and focusing on the udderbot, a ChucK MOS drum machine, interpoint duos, a radio drama about microtonality. What Were completed were PolyAnna and a Thanksgiving play (as noted in this blog).
December was frantically putting together Udderbot Xmas songs, ultimately an incomplete for now, save for the smooth hit single Kleismic Joy.
And here we are. What a strange journey for someone to make, even just considering the names of projects and pieces and not knowing their referents.
December 2006 was dominated by "onward", a 17-tone march for 17-tone pianos, eight hands. The result was not disastrous but I remember being embarrassed. I went home for weeks and schemed unsuccessfully for a winter concert of me and Tommy Scheurich - his bassoon-viola serial duo, my whatever I could pull together with my udderbot and laptop. I had brought home, for the second year in a row, a paper I hadn't finished--uggh. I asked for conduit tubing for Xmas, in hopes of making a 31-tone tubulon, and received about 100 feet of it which I still haven't done anything with!
Back at Rice mid January, I had a fancy new plan which included writing pieces for composition competitions, starting with a brass sextet, and a commission-like piece for the Attacca percussion trio (Rice graduates), both of which I started vigorously in my brand new staff paper book of 512 pages, and neither of which I got past the first page. Deadlines came and went...
February was eaten up by performances on my colleagues' master's recitals (much fun) and writing music for BakerShake's production of Much Ado Over Nothing, particularly a tango setting of John Donne's "Woman's Constancy." Getting that actually performed by the quasi-musical stage band was a daunting feat that included teaching accordion to a quasi-pianist.
Meanwhile I was excitedly preparing for a trip to London to go to their Microfest and also to meet with Musical Instrument Technology people about instrument building and the udderbot. That happened in the beginning of March, and that was wonderful. I met Donald Bousted and James Wyness and Chris Bryan and Stephen Altoft and Lee Ferguson, all of whom I hope to see again and collaborate with sometime. Stephen is collecting two-page pieces for 19-tone trumpet solo, and Donald continues to organize Microfests and Wild Dog microtonal multimedia extravaganzas.
When I got back, my recital was less than two months away and I was panicking. Two intended pieces to write that never even got started were the Hoogie Boogie for 16-tone player piano (which has been hanging over my head for years, and I think I'll complete this year), and a 5-bass-clarinet quintet (wow what a sound, I imagine). I began work on Udderbot Counterpoint for 9 recorded and 1 live udderbot, slotting it into a March 19 Composers Forum concert to move it along, but my self-agonizing procrastinatory process yielded a two-minute abortion that I performed anyway.
I successfully completed two pieces in time for my friday April 13 "Señor Recital": the 31-tone Orwellian Spiral Canon No. 1: Getting Started on a text by Annie Dillard (without permission, otherwise I'd be performing the heck out of it), and a spacious 17-tone 6-minute piano-and-voice setting of a text by Troy Suben:
the...which I titled "fonala", which is what you get when you try to type "urbana" in a Dvorak keyboard layout but you're actually in Qwerty. fonala was about 2/3 as good as it could have been, which was good enough for bassoon professor Kamins, a longtime follower of my microtonal antics, to proclaim that I had finally made some successful microtonal music.
sun
is
full
of
currency
wise
of
rays
that
fill
my
thinking
and
I
can't
think
any
more
I did complete a third piece, but I won't call it successful: Bonnie Brae at Midnight was a graphic/text score composition/improvisation for the 5 composers living at 1618 Bonnie Brae at that time; the score mostly specified which of the fifty-something instruments, sitting in a pile, we were to play in which order.
But no room to breathe there: on to an electronic music studio concert less than a week later, for another performance of Getting Started tacked on, as well as an utter technical disaster of a 31-autotuner I had built in Kyma. I hadn't had time to actually write any music, or ensure that the sounds produced by the violin and bass wouldn't be completely unlistenable. Yes, that might be the height of my personal embarrassment for 2007.
Oh, also Jan. and Feb. I was finishing up my string quartet from 2005 and titling it "stuck" and courting string quartets, which you really have to do more in advance than the entire length of my timetable allows. It was a week before my recital and I didn't have a violist. I guess I should send that to some quartets with ample time to rehearse sometime this year.
After that, organizing the 17-tone piano project phase Three concert in less than a month happened. What a glorious mess that process was!
Tons and tons of exciting thinking over the summer, with not much music pieces to show for it. For the first time I felt free from defining myself as strictly "composer."
"Noodles adorno foucault," an improvised sketch for autotuned voices, was recorded in a flash and well loved by everyone; I'm now considering an album or set of pieces that use that sound world.
Trying to write a 19-tone pianos and udderbot piece from a Minneapolis without any keyboard proved impossible, as did mustering up the guts to finish it once moved into Urbana. Still I attended the Chicago concert in October and deliciously met and listened to George Secor, Aaron K. Johnson, Chris Bailey, Easley Blackwood, Joel Mandelbaum, and that one student whose name and email I shouldn't have lost.
The fall was dominated by worrying about money and designing society. Unfortunately we're not at the point of having designed a society where these are the same thing. Many small compositions were made, sometimes in collaboration with others, for various assignments. I do intend to collect these from myself and others into an archive. I started thinking seriously about hocket, and more generally Interpoint, as a point of departure.
November at I-Park sparked a renewed set of hopeful projects, all begun but none completed there: microtonal utopian (false-statement) rounds, "vocal alternations", a bass clef 31-tone method book revisited, more composing and focusing on the udderbot, a ChucK MOS drum machine, interpoint duos, a radio drama about microtonality. What Were completed were PolyAnna and a Thanksgiving play (as noted in this blog).
December was frantically putting together Udderbot Xmas songs, ultimately an incomplete for now, save for the smooth hit single Kleismic Joy.
And here we are. What a strange journey for someone to make, even just considering the names of projects and pieces and not knowing their referents.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Vocal stretch for Jan 1
A stretch, an experiment with a focus more personal than social.
Objective: remain conscious of performance of a 'normal speaking voice' and awareness of the amount of energy it takes merely to ensure
Do not mutter.
Speak all utterances with more-than-sufficient volume, with excellent 'diction and articulation', in a low, deep, booming resonant tone. Try to establish a range of expressivity comparable to that of your habitual performance, but within this new right.
Take note of obvious social consequences, if you see any.
Objective: remain conscious of performance of a 'normal speaking voice' and awareness of the amount of energy it takes merely to ensure
Do not mutter.
Speak all utterances with more-than-sufficient volume, with excellent 'diction and articulation', in a low, deep, booming resonant tone. Try to establish a range of expressivity comparable to that of your habitual performance, but within this new right.
Take note of obvious social consequences, if you see any.
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