Posts tagged as music
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- Tuesday, April 23, 2013:
Stuff In My Drawers Day My audition form from All-District Band tryouts in 7th grade, or "best ways to burn a young musician when you're in the Army band but have to spend the weekend slumming as an audition judge to pay the rent." - Tuesday, April 09, 2013:
Music Tuesday For your musical enrichment, here is an aleatoric piece my Mom wrote in music school 42 years ago. It was A material. Carol Burgtorf T315 Assignment due May 4, 1971 Title : TACTUS 1 (GHOSTS) Necessary Personnel : One human being whose pulse will be continually monitored by another, the conductor , who will simultaneously beat time at the heartbeat rate; three pianists who all sit at one piano; a four-part mixed chorus . The piece will begin: when the conductor can establish a clear pulse rate for a tempo. table.aleatoric th { font-size: 10pt... - Tuesday, March 05, 2013:
Composing Spotlight: Unfinished Works Here are more unfinished fragments from long-abandoned Finale folders. The first is the introduction from a samba, which I started in my senior year of high school: Unfinished Samba (0:43 MP3) This piece never got further than the introduction for one likely reason: I was too inexperienced to actually write a samba. Sure, it's easy to write a chord while the trumpet player pretends to be Rafael Mendez, and it's also easy to copy the piano part out of a Victor Lopez samba chart. After that, some compositional skill may be required. Next up was a trombone-euphonium duet from undergrad: Unfinished Fragment (0:16 MP3) This was the firs... - Tuesday, January 29, 2013:
Music Archaeology Day Charting the evolution of my musical tastes through 13 years of representative Amazon sales - Tuesday, January 08, 2013:
List Day: Pragmatic Musical Instrument Selection In elementary school, I chose to play the trumpet because it was easy to carry, had all of the melodies, and didn't involve depletable accessories like reeds. Plus, it had a smaller section: does anyone really want to compete with 20 other kids just to play a clarinet or violin solo? I stopped playing the trumpet because you lose your tone quality every time you go for more than a week without practice, which means that there's always a rebuilding period when you want to start again. I briefly tried playing the guitar around 2005, but stopped after it exacerbated the typing pain in my left hand, which originally stemmed from writing code at $10 per line and/or mashing WASD in computer game... - Tuesday, December 11, 2012:
List Day: 2012 in Twelves Top 12 Songs First Heard in 2012 Sia - Academia : Roughly half of the time I hear a Sia song, I get annoyed by her voice. However, I like the singsongy quality of this particular song. April Smith - Movie Loves a Screen : A lighthearted song suggested by Pandora before it played three Jack Johnson songs in a row. Boulevard des Airs - Paris-Corbeil : In high school, I knew a guy named Kwan who later played in a ska band. This is the time of song I imagine him playing nightly. Elizabeth & The Catapult - Taller Children :&nb... - Tuesday, November 27, 2012:
Music Tuesday: Spectralism and Other Gimmicks Mike (of Mike and Chompy) came out for a visit a couple weeks back and mentioned his interest in going back to school for a music composition Ph.D. When asked what sort of musical fads were getting all of the youngsters excited these days, he described spectralism, which is a compositional style based on sonographic representations and mathematical analysis of sound spectra, where timbre is the most important element. In order to become an overnight expert in spectralism, I used Google to find a page with three or four songs embedded, including Lichtbogen by Saariaho , and listened to them multiple times without judgement. What I found was that I still probably wouldn't do very well in a doctoral comp... - Tuesday, November 13, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Scarabus I wrote Scarabus in the spring semester of my third year of undergrad, solely because of an offhand remark from a piano player. All music majors at Virginia Tech had to perform once a semester at "Convocation", a weekly gathering with mandatory attendance (but no mandatory wakefulness). Because a composer is the final word in how to interpret his own works, I would sometimes play my own music on the trumpet: an end-run around having to perform the same Persichetti garbage as every trumpeter for ego-filled comparison. The first work I performed was the first movement of The Hero , a wind band trumpet concerto that I squished into a piano accompaniment without much skill or foresight. ... - Tuesday, November 06, 2012:
Music Tuesday: Anything Can Be Pep Band Music When I was first getting started in composing in 1995, my bread and butter was pep band music. Each arrangement was fairly short, subtlety was less important than projection, and the style was usually more fun for high school kids to get into than wind band stuff. This was especially noticeable at T.C. Williams in the mid 90s, as we were something of a special needs marching band. In the years before Bob Zazzara flooded the group with enthusiasm and its own zip code, the T.C. Marching Titans rarely peaked at 50 players, and couldn't afford much in the way of music (we had to wait for the quarter notes to go on sale for a dime). In this environment, where we alternated between a song called "Bread Man" and "The Wanderer" o... - Tuesday, October 23, 2012:
Survey of Jazz History Between 1994 and 2002, jazz was the primary type of music I listened to. I was that annoying kid that had 90.1 FM blaring in the car until they ran out of money and stopped playing jazz before 11 PM. I own at least twelve CDs by the Stan Kenton Orchestra, and stayed home learning the chord changes to Eager Beaver while all of the other high school senior boys were searching for eager beavers of their own. I lost some of my interest in college, after multiple semesters of failed jazz band auditions while watching some obliviously horrible trumpeters make the cut -- apparently Chip McNeill was not a fan of my mellow tones. He did, however, teach me one important lesson: always take courses taught by the jazz faculty... - Friday, October 19, 2012:
Mashup Day: Doogie Howsereen, M.D. Have you ever been sifting through your extensive music collection in search of Halloween music and stumbled across the theme from the Halloween movies? Did you then lament the fact that no one had ever made a mashup combining it with the theme from Doogie Howser, M.D.? Happens to me all of the time. Listen to Doogie Howsereen, M.D. (2:00 MP3) This is why people with otherwise useless music degrees are an integral slipknot in the weave of today's society. - Tuesday, October 16, 2012:
List Day: 8 Musical Tropes That Need to Stop Synthesized Brass Samples : The only circumstances where you're allowed to substitute MIDI for brass instruments is if you're writing music for a cruise line commercial in the late 80s. Fade Outs : You shouldn't be allowed to release your song until it has a great ending. Wouldn't you be upset if your favourite book just faded out? If you're having trouble writing one great ending, write about twenty mediocre endings and stack them -- it worked for the Lord of the Rings movies. Autotune : I'll give a pass if you use autotune for it's intended purpose, because I don't want to listen to your awful off-pitch singing. However, is your song really going to b... - Tuesday, October 09, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement IX. Egress Concluding the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis... I enjoy ending pieces with lots of flash and finality, and intentionally went in the other direction to close out the final movement of Labyrinth . In this case, I started with the original melody from the first movement: Like a devil-worshipping 60s band, I then flipped the notes around and played it backwards to create the closing melody: In spite of the "falling through the movements" feeling I captured, and the meandering nature of the thematic content, the piece is actually very symmetrical, opening and closing in the same place, and allotting similar ... - Tuesday, October 02, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement VIII. Determination Redux Continuing the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis... The eighth movement of this piece started on page 59 of the score, and having composed it from start to finish in order, I was sick of it. By now, it had been six months since the beginning, and I was back in Virginia for a 2002 winter break that was just slightly colder than a Tallahassee winter break. The benefit of composing in order was that, by now, I knew exactly where the piece needed to go and what I wanted to say in the remaining measures. The poking and meandering of my composing process closely mirrored the exploratory approach of the protagonist in the labyrinth, ... - Tuesday, September 25, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement VII. Flight Continuing the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis... This is the shortest of the nine movements, weighing in at just over thirty seconds. After the adversary motive breaks the suspended abeyance of the sixth movement , this movement is a purely visceral escape with no goal in mind. To emphasize the lack of planning, there are no real melodies in this movement -- all of the material is grabbed from rhythms and counterpoints of previous movements and mashed together. The feeling I was trying to get, especially with the oboe line, is that you are hearing a counter-line to an unheard melody -- a melody that you could probably identify by filling ... - Tuesday, September 18, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement VI. Abeyance Continuing the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis... It's all downhill from here. Everything through the fifth movement was the inexorable, but meandering churn up a roller coaster hill, and the remaining movements zip along to a conclusion. The sixth movement is the "SQUIRREL!" movement, where the protagonist who had gotten emo about his chances to solve the labyrinth is temporarily distracted by flighty, stutter-stepping melodic material. For the first time, the flutes get to do something more interesting than playing minor seconds together. Their melody banters with the soprano sax, and gradually gets more out of control and whirling der... - Tuesday, September 11, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement V. Despondency Continuing the walkthrough of my Master's Thesis... This movement marks the midpoint of the Labyrinth, and also functions as a developmental bridge between I-IV and VI-IX. Chased out of the fourth movement by some sort of minotaur-like presence, forward motion grinds to a halt here. The entire fifth movement is characterized by slow, plodding, elephantine motions, gradually getting deeper and muddier until it collapses under its own weight. The primary melodic material in this section is played by the violin, and was first introduced by muted trumpet in the third movement -- it has morphed from a busy, productive line into a mo... - Tuesday, September 04, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement IV. Adversary Continuing the analysis of my Master's Thesis, about eleven years too late to get invited to speak at any theory conferences... The motive that opens this movement is the derived from the last measure of the original theme, and acts in the role of an interrupting cow throughout the piece. In this case, the motive is used to break up the static feeling of the third movement . Although this piece has nine movements, things can get a little more meta by grouping Movement I through IV and Movement VI through IX together. This makes Movement IV the climax of the first third, in a way that would probably satisfy Hauptmann in his grave. The inter... - Tuesday, August 28, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement III. Perplexity The dogged determination of the second movement dead-ends into a more static, murky feeling, with the barline intentionally blurred through the repetition of a major thirds motive by vibraphone and flutes, first together, and then gradually spacing apart. The motion in this movement is supposed to be less purposeful. At two points in the movement, the muted trumpet attempts to reinstill a steady beat (bringing back the determination) with a melody derived from the major thirds motive, but each attempt to do so results in the wrong meter and ultimate stagnates back to the vibraphone. After the first attempt, the tonal center is where it started, but th... - Tuesday, August 21, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement II. Determination Picking up immediately where the first movement left off, the second movement was characterized by a regular beat, and motivated, driving melodic lines. Although I didn't use classical key signatures in this work, the tonal center between movement I and II fell from a D to a Db, which was intended to signify motion in unexpected directions through this labyrinth. The first melodic line in this section (once again doubled between sax and violins, as dictated by Rob Kelley's favourite joke) is derived from the half-whole-half step motive. It's written in a triple meter (12/8), because classical musicians often have trouble swinging merely fr... - Tuesday, August 14, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Labyrinth Movement I. Ingress Labyrinth is the longest continuous composition I've ever written. By the low standards of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, this also makes it the best one. Weighing in at about sixteen minutes, Labyrinth is a chamber ensemble piece in nine movements (performed without pause). I wrote it as my Master's Thesis at Florida State back in 2002. The piece was written for a chamber ensemble consisting of 2 flutes, 1 oboe, 1 alto sax (doubling soprano), 1 bassoon, 1 trumpet, 2 horns, 1 trombone, 1 tuba, 2 violins, 1 cello, 1 double bass, 2 percussionists, and a conductor. The low probability of ever having these 17 musicians in the ... - Tuesday, June 26, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Unfinished Works Composing music is a lot like going to the bathroom: the vast quantity of music you write will immediately be discarded, and you really need to have produced a diamond to make saving it a worthwhile venture. I have dozens of folders of unfinished tunes, from longer works that I simply lost interest in before they were done, to shorter fragments that I edited out of existing works when they didn't quite fit, to two and three bar motives hastily jotted down after a night's dream. Here is an unfinished work I started in December 2006 -- a jazz chart based upon a simple melody that Anna plunked out on her piano. I don't know why it was never completed, but I can theorize that I was distracted trying to obtain an epic ... - Tuesday, May 15, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: Round-the-Clock Blues Round-the-Clock Blues was my last composition from the high school era, before I went off to college for formal training to write seriously serious music with themes and other garbage. I got the title from a dictionary of cliches, which is common for most blues charts but which doesn't reach the creative heights of Stan Kenton's Blues in Asia Minor . This was the longest composition to date, clocking in over six minutes in length and taking two and a half months to write. Listen (6:21 MP3) As previously mentioned, I learned jazz harmonies by requesting sample tapes and scores from sellers of jazz sheet music. Kendor Jazz was especially bountiful ... - Tuesday, May 08, 2012:
Composing Spotlight: First Composition For the longest time, I thought that my first written composition was The Proud Beagle , written for the Reflections Contest in the fifth grade. Just recently, I discovered an earlier gem in the piano bench at my parents' house. Listen (0:30 MP3) Although it is untitled, and apparently I had not yet discovered the "bass clef", I composed that entire modulation from C major to d minor by instinct alone, converting VIIb to VI with panache. And as any music theorist will tell you, it doesn't matter if a composer knew what he was writing -- what matters is that it was there to be discovered after the fact. - Tuesday, February 21, 2012:
Music Tuesday This is a recording of my Solo and Ensemble performance as a freshman in 1993, in the days when "staccato" meant "as short as possible" with none of that "detached" subversiveness in the mix. "Missing a lot of notes" also meant "getting a Superior rating", because every young musician is a gem to be coddled. - Friday, February 17, 2012:
List Day: The First Songs I Heard (Which Led to Buying an Album) A Fine Frenzy - You Picked Me Amy MacDonald - This Is the Life Bitter:Sweet- The Mating Game The Cardigans- I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer Eisley - Plenty of Paper Ellie Lawson - L.A. Gabriella Cilmi - Sweet About Me Gomez - How We Operate Hoosiers - Worried About Ray Hush Sound - Don't Wake Me Up Ingrid Michaelson- Far Away Jem - Just a Ride Just Jack - Starz in Their Eyes KT Tunstall -... - Tuesday, January 31, 2012:
Hail Virginia Redux Five years ago today, I composed a new Virginia state song , insignificantly outraged that the land of yearly car inspections had been without official music since 1998. Because of its saucy lyrics, the previous song, "Carry Me Back", was designated by the General Assembly as "state song emeritus". (For those of you who did not go to college, this means that the song has the obligation to show up at least once a week and look pretty in the brochure, but is under no obligation to actually teach anything). There's probably a touch of favouritism involved when Virginia isn't allowed to say "old darkey", but Arkansas can have an overtly sexual song called "You Run Deep In Me" and innuendo-oozing lyrics like "mall... - Tuesday, September 20, 2011:
Composing Spotlight: Early Funk-Rock I was on the road and/or in meetings all day yesterday so I didn't have a chance to compose a Museday excerpt. Instead, I've pulled an old composition from early 1997 out of the cabinet. Early Funk-Rock (490KB MP3) This was written in my freshman year of college, in the happy period after I was proficient at the technical and mechanical process of composing, but before I knew any "better" than to use major chords, I-VIIb-VI-V progressions, or write music that people might actually want to listen to outside of a student recital. I think composers should spend as long as possible in that peppy pocket, before getting swayed by professors who want more wrong notes or colleagues w... - Friday, April 29, 2011:
Recital Day Part IV of IV Can you believe that it's already the end of April 2011, or that ten years have passed since I was an undergrad? It's very true that time flies like a banana, when thrown by a monkey. Once the recital had ended, there was nothing else to do but lounge around waiting for grad school to start (This was helped by the fact that I was only taking a bare minimum of 12 credits in that last semester, and I didn't even attend the sole non-music course once I'd established an A). It was also during this period that I started looking for the next big project and turned this website into a blog. The final piece on the recital, not including the obligatory encore march, was a three move... - Thursday, April 28, 2011:
Recital Day Part III of IV By far, the poster with the most longevity and popularity was the Asian Invasion poster, which still hangs in my office at work. The creation of this poster required me to expand my massive collection of Dave Matthews and Canadian Brass CDs with my first and last Beatles purchase ($8.99 in the bargain bin at the Christiansburg Walmart). After reshuffling the flowers to spell URI! and a trumpet, I splattered the background with friends and professors from high school and beyond. You can even see the plastic cow we put on Jason Chrisley's birthday cake on the left side below Mike Robb. This poster, and all of the rest from the complete series found a second life in Tallahass... - Wednesday, April 27, 2011:
Recital Day Part II of IV Promotional concerns for the URI! Recital took on as much importance as musical ones, since you can even make a musicologist's recital sound good if you advertise it with enough verve. The poster in yesterday's post was created with the help of Paige, who took fifty pictures of me in various poses which I then Photoshopped together. Since this was one of my first photo-editing outings, my original idea of showing a huge trumpet choir on stage was nixed when the shadows became too difficult to manipulate. The first promotional poster went up in August before the recital, and a new one came out each month, like a comic book for music nerds. I used the posters to learn all about... - Tuesday, April 26, 2011:
Recital Day Part I of IV This Friday marks the 10th Anniversary of my undergraduate recital, and seeing as how my daily updates are starved for content more often than any given page of eHow.com, I thought I would spend the next few days doing an indulgent Behind-the-Scenes, Where-Are-They-Now, Blu-ray-Edition-With-Deleted-Scenes retrospective on the whole affair. My recital was one of the few instances in life where I actually displayed qualities that could be mistaken for ambition , which is why I like to pull it out of the closet every few years and parade it around like a six-year-old son who just won a Halleys Comet trivia championship. By the numbers, The URI! Recit... - Tuesday, February 24, 2009:
Composing Spotlight: Clown Facades I sat down last night to write a Museday, but was struggling with inspiration. Instead, I decided to relisten to one of the pieces I wrote in my brief stint as a fulll-time composer: a commission I received in the spring of my 4th year of perpetual college. On the few times I received commissions, I always tried to nail down as many rules as possible up front, because more constraints generally lead to more creativity in trying to break those constraints down. Composing is the hardest when you have a blank screen and no direction at all (which is why Museday always starts from a single word). The rules I had for this composition: The piece must be for trombone, euphonium, and piano. The tromboni... - Thursday, December 04, 2008:
Review Day: CDs Galore Set the Mood , David Jordan: I purchased this import album based on the strength of the UK hit single, "Sun Goes Down". David Jordan does have talent that goes beyond looking like an angsty Wallace Fennell, and the songs on the CD are catchy, if more at home on an episode of American Idol than anywhere else. The tunes are forgettable but fun, and the only noticeable shortcoming is when Jordan tries to sing below his vocal range and ends up sounding like a character from Sesame Street. Final Grade : B- Sun Goes Down (300KB MP3) Love Song (340KB MP3) Best Of , The Cardigans: All too often, greatest h... - Tuesday, September 16, 2008:
Contest Day Name That Tune: Cacophony Edition It's been seven months since the last Name That Tune contest, mainly because it took about two months to mix these samples to perfection. There are 20 song fragments bunched together into just 4 clips. The person who correctly identifies the most songs out of 20 will win a gift certificate for $20 to Amazon.com. Read on for the rules! Each clip contains five songs mashed together, one from each of five genres. You must provide the following information to get a song correct: Classical Song: Composer & Title (movement not necessary) Jazz/Dance Song: Artist & Title Musical: Musical & Song Title Rock... - Monday, August 18, 2008:
Coldplay Day On Friday, XM Radio finally ended its ridiculous musical experiment, "Thirty Days of Coldplay", during which Channel Crazy-European-Techno-Music was replaced by Channel Soft-Rock-Coldplay-All-Hours-Of-The-Day. Doing the math, there are 720 hours of airtime to be filled with Coldplay's entire discography which (according to Allmusic.com) amounts to about 60 songs. At four minutes per song (five in the ones that employ the typical soft-rock vamp which almost puts them in the trance genre), there's guaranteed to be a bit of dead air. Some gaps are filled with inane commentary, such as the drummer's insistence that one song was too hard rock to be appreciated by the audience before performing a song that would almost ... - Wednesday, June 11, 2008:
Review Day: HAARP H.A.A.R.P. is the latest release from Muse -- a CD/DVD set from a live concert at Wembly Stadium in the UK. I'm usually not a fan of live CDs and I was disappointed with their previous live album, Hullbaloo Soundtrack, which was full of audience noise, rougher less crowd-pleasing B-sides, and an imbalanced mix of vocals under the guitars. This time, however, I was pleasantly surprised. The CD offers 70 minutes of hits from all four of their major albums (favouring the most recent ones), and the DVD is a well-edited hour-and-a-half extract of the concert in 5.1 surround sound (including everything that's on the CD plus 6 more songs). The whole package can be found for $14 retail or as little as $9 on... - Thursday, March 06, 2008:
Review Day: Girls and Boys Girls and Boys is a CD by Ingrid Michaelson, whose music has appeared on XM Radio, Grey's Anatomy, and Old Navy commercials. It's a mix of styles from KT Tunstall to Jem to a non-annoying version of Vanessa Carlton, and was one of several mini-presents Rebecca left me when she went to Guatemala last month. I ended up liking the CD so much that I downloaded the whole thing online to support the artist through Amazon's sleek MP3 store. Music on the CD runs a gamut of emotions and is always pleasant to listen to even if you (like me) don't really listen to the lyrics. I had this CD looping in my car for about a week before loaning it to Anna, and only ever got tired of one song, December Baby , bec... - Wednesday, January 23, 2008:
Memory Day: Comedy Records While driving home from the super-secret pencil factory in Bailey's Crossroad yesterday, I stumbled upon an Interview with Ray Stevens on XM Radio channel 2 -- I was trying to get to UPOP on 29 and didn't hit the 9 fast enough. The interviewer himself was annoying, as most interviewers and talk show hosts are wont to be, but it was a fun trip down memory lane to hear some of Ray's greatest hits and his commentary on them. To shamelessly milk this bit of nostalgia, I've decided to post recordings of my favourite comedy songs from my youth. While everyone else my age was listening to the New Kids on the Block or U2, I was enthralled with comic masters from the 1940s through the 1970s, and I'm fairly certain these songs ... - Thursday, December 06, 2007:
Review Day: Avenue Q What do you do with a B.A. in English, What is my life going to be? Four years of college and plenty of knowledge, Have earned me this useless degree. I can't pay the bills yet, 'Cause I have no skills yet, The world is a big scary place. After the "Avenue Q theme and opening sequence" play on two massive television screens that drop down from the ceiling, this is the first song of the evening, sung by the fresh-faced puppet, Princeton, who has just graduated from college and realized that he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He moves onto Avenue Q (because the rent on Avenue A through P is too expensive), and meets a Sesame-Street-like collection of neighbours, b... - Thursday, November 01, 2007:
Review Day: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee We went to see this "play with music" at the National Theatre last Saturday following a nice meal at the inexpensive Chef Geoff's around the corner. The 100 minute show is a parody of your typical televised spelling bee, with zany characters such as the antisocial nerd from TJ, the crazy home-schooled boy named Leaf, the perfect Asian who knows six languages, and the Boy Scout who gets an unfortunate erection in front of the audience. There are no sweeping themes or French revolutions, but in this case, it's fine. The show never tries to be more than a nonstop barrage of one-liners and funny quips. Many of the quips are obviously improvised, since four of the contestants are randomly picked from the audience at show t... - Thursday, August 30, 2007:
Musical Musings / Review Day Amazon Marketplace has been the catalyst to kick start my long dormant CD-buying habits. In the past I averaged maybe five CDs per year, but the ability to get brand new CDs (still shrink-wrapped) for $3 to $6 each drives my clicky yuppy fingers wild. At this price, CDs with a musical prowess roughly equivalent to an undergraduate student trumpet recital recorded from the Green Room are much easier to dismiss without regrets. Night on My Side by Gemma Hayes I'd only heard a couple songs by Gemma Hayes when I bought this CD, but I really liked the timbre of her voice -- kind of like a Sia with less laryngitis. It turned out to be a major disappointment, with unmemorable tracks and several of those anno... - Thursday, August 02, 2007:
Review Day: Philosophy Tree I generally keep a stash of CDs in the car for those occasions when I'm not in the mood for anything on XM Radio (or when Ted Kelly is reciting the complete UPOP Station Slogan on-air for the fifth time in five minutes in case we've forgotten that we're listening to the Pop Heard Around the World, With Global Hits from Coast to Coast in America and on Worldspace Shut The Hell Up and Play the Damn Songs Amen). One way to determine the strength of an album is to put it in this car stash and see how long it takes before I get so sick of it that it must be rotated out. So far, the four longest-surviving albums in my Car Challenge are: Absolution - Muse, Long Gone Before Daylight - The Cardigans, &n... - Thursday, July 19, 2007:
Governor's School Week: Part IV of V Before my senior year, I was a decent (if uninspired) trumpet player, easily making last chair or first alternate in All-District Bands. Although I was no Jason Price, I had a strong sense of rhythm and sightreading, and a secret weapon, my "beautiful tone". It didn't matter if I was playing a marching band tune or the solo in a Jim Swearingen song -- the only compliment I would ever get was "Wow, you have a beautiful tone!". I was the Tone Master -- if printers ran on tone instead of toner, I would have that call center job wrapped around my pinky finger. During my senior year, I started experimenting with oddball mouthpieces like the 14B3A and the C3P0 because I figured it would be more fun to play high notes in jaz... - Thursday, June 14, 2007:
Musical Musings Last weekend, we went to hear Rebecca Berlin at a local Starbucks which was not much larger than I am (and not nearly as good-looking, of course). She rotated sets with her sister, and played a few songs together as well. Overall, it was a strong performance, despite the fact that Starbucks never turned off their piped-in background music. I bought a copy of her demo CD, which you might enjoy if you're into coffeehousey singy music -- her voice isn't perfectly polished, but it's pretty damn good for a young'n. Rebecca Berlin - California (1:20 MP3) Rebecca Berlin - Monochrome (1:10 MP3) New on my playlist this month: Charlat... - Thursday, March 29, 2007:
Musical Musings I picked up three new CDs this month. The first is Acoustic Extravaganza by KT Tunstall, and contains a batch of new acoustic works, as well as some new renditions of her old stuff. The best song on on the CD is Girl and the Ghost which seems to capture her style to a fine point. Also notable is her reworking of Universe and You as a quieter, more intimate piece. It's very rare that I like an acoustic recording of a song after hearing the "full" version, but I think I like this one just as much as the original -- it also highlights how little the power of her voice depends on the surrounding orchestration. Girl and the Ghost (516KB MP3) Universe and Yo... - Thursday, February 22, 2007:
Audience Participation Day: Write My Lyrics Happy 222 Thursday! In the spirit of the harmlessly funny movie, Music and Lyrics , which I saw on Sunday, I've come up with a song without words which is just crying out for your lyrical prose. Now is your chance to put all those AP English classes to good use and bury me in your artistic gerunds and dangling participles of doom. Here are the rules for this contest: Write 2 verses, a chorus, and a bridge to the melodies below (There is a 3rd verse, but only overachievers need to write it). An MP3 sample has been provided for anyone who can't read music. You may slightly alter the rhythms to fit your lyrics, but you may not make wholesale changes to the chords or melodic lines.&n... - Wednesday, February 21, 2007:
Musical Musings It's been ten months since my last Musical Musings column which may be the blink of an eye on the geological scale, but is an eternity on the celebrity marriages scale (this scale is much more scientific and applicable in everyday life. Incidentally, ever since Rob confessed that "everyday" versus "every day" was his pet peeve, I have been careful to use the appropriate terminology). I'm currently listening to A Camp , a solo album by Nina Persson of The Cardigans. Despite the ambiguous title, the CD is an interesting piece of work -- a mix of country-tinged ballads and hard-rock creations. Though jarring at first, the change actually makes sense with the change in Persson's voice (she can... - Thursday, February 01, 2007:
Musical Patriotism Day There was an article in the Post yesterday about Virginia's revived interest in picking a new state song that doesn't offensively talk about darkies . The last time they tried to pick one, the committee could not reach a consensus on any of the finalists' songs -- and now our poor state has been tuneless for almost seven years. We at the URI! Zone consider this to be a travesty of the second highest order, and hypothesize that it could not possibly take almost a decade to come up with a song that everyone can love. To prove this, I sat down at my keyboard after dinner last night and allowed the creative energies of this blue-ridged state to course through me like the James River, but with less pollutants a... - Tuesday, November 28, 2006:
Stop the Brasses Raiders of the Lost Ark falls squarely into the camp of "late-70s movies that are now too annoying to watch". This subset of movies is often characterized by trying to be more epic than they really are, midday showings on TBS or AMC, handguns that sound like cannons, bad grainy Technicolor with earth tones, or random appearances of a young Robert Redford. A few years and sensibilities later, it would have squeaked into the "goofy 80s movie that's loveable because it's so 80s", but it's held back by the teeming masses of random foreign plotless extras, a heroine that can't act, and strings of scenes that don't really make much sense when put together. The most saliently annoying feature though is the John Williams sou... - Wednesday, August 30, 2006:
Discography Day It's a peculiarity of my personality that I generally will pick the longer CD over the shorter, possibly better one. It's a throwback from the days when I had to make every CD purchase count, and the CD player only held one disc at a time. Subconsciously I must believe that there's a higher chance of finding good music if there's more to choose from. The same applies to musical groups -- if I find a group I really like, I'll collect as much of their discography as possible (see also, the complete works of the Hi-Lo's and twenty-odd CDs of the Stan Kenton Orchestra). There aren't many groups that I like well enough to justify shelling out the $15 per CD when I could be using that money to pay one third of the cable bill so I can ... - Thursday, August 03, 2006:
Review Day: Black Holes and Revelations A few weeks back, Muse released their fifth album, Black Holes and Revelations , which quickly became their second album to reach number one on the U.K. charts. I first discovered Muse in August 2004 when Butterflies and Hurricanes played on my XM Radio somewhere on the road between Philip Barbie's wedding and the Outer Banks, and I was immediately struck by how musical their music is, despite their hard rock stylings and occasional foray into the use of noise as a musical instrument. The first CD, Showbiz was a rough, noisy first stab with a few catchy tracks. The second, Origin of Symmetry sacrificed the idea of catchy singles for a cohesive concept album with a... - Tuesday, May 02, 2006:
Goo Goo Gaa Gaa I should have known going into it that I'd never make it as a great composer, because I could never compete with the pure talent which is evident in this song: (2.12MB MP3). Whoever wrote this song deserves to be in Chapter One of every History of Western Music book on the face of the planet. Goo Goo Gaa Gaa is a representative track from an 80s audio cassette called Are We There Yet?: Songs for the Car published by Rand McNally. I no longer have the book full of car games, but I rediscovered the tape just last week and relived the memories of being strapped into hot leather seats in a Chevrolet being driven to just one more battleground every weekend. Here are some other sam... - Monday, May 01, 2006:
Organization Last Thursday night, I had nothing to do, because the Internet had gone out in my house, and if it's not on the Internet, it's not worth doing. I took the opportunity to organize my CD collection, a behemoth of a task that I'd been putting off since I graduated from college in '01. I'm the kind of guy that carries all of his CDs in those big black cases that are halfway between a Trapper Keeper and a scrapbook, but I also tend to forget some CDs in their jewel cases, or in the car, or maybe the shower. My old CD cases were reasonably well organized by genre, except that the last half of each case had random CDs thrown in, in the order that I'd bought them. Two hours later, I discovered that I own four hundred and forty-nine... - Tuesday, April 25, 2006:
One Time At Band Camp because blogs always have to have at least one post titled as such, to show that the writer is hip and with it Last year, I mentioned that my arrangement of Brick House would be featured on the next Marching Virginians CD . When I went down to Blacksburg last weekend, I scored a free copy of the CD, irrevocably eating into the profits of the marching band and forcing them to march through cow dung for the rest of their days. You can now hear this buzzworthy arrangement here (505KB MP3). It's actually the first version I wrote in 2000, not the revised edition from 2001 , because (as all musicians know) the version you don't want anyone to hear ever again is the one t... - Thursday, April 06, 2006:
Musical Musings I'm liking The Cardigans, especially the syrupy nature of the lead singer's vocals, as heard on Erase/Rewind (469KB MP3). I also like the vocal acrobatics and the sheer musical audacity of The Darkness, as heard on One Way Ticket to Hell (511KB MP3). They do camp in a good way. Three worst songs I've heard on the radio this week: Gwen Stefani - Crash (346KB MP3) She's obviously forgotten what a melody is and her beat sounds like the kid in marching band who didn't have enough rhythm to play the snare drum so they got the triangle. If the movie, Crash , had used this for a theme song, you never would have seen them in the running ... - Monday, March 20, 2006:
Untitled Post While listening to a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at my parents' house last night, I was struck by the plethora of nonsecular music that has accumulated over the last thousand years. We have millions of songs and hymns about Jesus and dreidles, angels flying high, and chariots swinging low. It seems like there's a piece composed or invented for virtually every important religious scene or feeling and every religion has a few ditties that you can sing on the street which everyone will join in on. However, there is one religion that, sadly, does not have any uplifting music to go along with it. What is that religion? Scientology! I thought at first I must be mistaken, because every religion has some va... - Tuesday, January 17, 2006:
Capsule Review Day: Les Miserables Today I will hit the high points of Sunday's show in as few words as possible, since my Florida readers hate when I talk about musicals. In some places, I've linked to MP3s of what I think are the "best performers in that role",taken from my Les Mis Week in 2002 . Jean Valjean: Randal Keith : The only returning cast member. Excellent, possibly even better than before. Effortlessly hit the highs, the lows, the louds, and the softs. Javert: Robert Hunt : Tried too hard to be evil when the character is just an authority figure. Good voice, okay actor. Pissed me off all the time by changing the rhythm of the lyrics. The composer wrote those eighth notes for a ... - Thursday, January 12, 2006:
Musical Musings Keane grows on me more everytime I listen to their music. A friend from work introduced me to them last summer and I thought they were kind of annoying at first, but they're not so bad after repeated listenings. I would like the song, Bedshaped , more if they didn't use that horrible Game-Boy-sounding choir sample in the middle of the song (207KB MP3) -- it's more unfortunate than the tubular bells in Natalie Imbruglia's Counting Down the Days . That choir sample turns an otherwise good pop song into a tape I might have brought to one of my undergrad composition lessons recorded on my Ensoniq Soundscape. I haven't talked about contemporary composition in years. I haven't had any deep... - Thursday, December 15, 2005:
Musical Musings The temperature was near 10 degrees with gusty winds, since this morning was an appetizer for the wintry mix we're supposed to get later today. So it was with great reluctance that I woke up at 7:30 AM instead of 5:30 AM and cranked the heat up to a toasty 73 degrees. Now you are at work, and I'm not. LOL! Actually, I had already planned on taking today off, because by the end of yesterday I was already one hour over my quota for the pay period, and I don't believe in overtime unless it's for something extraordinary (see also, December 2004 where I worked 80-hour weeks for about two months). After a leisurely morning of English muffins, blankets, and cats, I'm now ready to sit down to write today's update. ... - Thursday, October 20, 2005:
Musical Motives I like Muse's Sing For Absolution (807KB MP3) more every time I hear it. It's easy to intend for a song to have an ear-catching haunting sound, but pulling it off is pretty difficult. Another song that I think pulls this off successfully is Train's Ordinary . The end of this excerpt from Skindred's The Fear strongly reminds me of a similar sound from an 80s rock song, but I can't place it. Any ideas? (147KB MP3) It was announced that Sharon Stone recently co-wrote a song for a Hurricane Katrina album . It must be nice to have so much money and fame that you can just decide to do stuff like that out of the blue. When I am independently wealthy... - Thursday, September 29, 2005:
Musical Motives I haven't had a musical post in a couple weeks, so this is an attempt to fill the musical void in your life. When given the choice between going to a live concert and buying the CD, I would much rather buy the CD. I want the perfection and the clarity of the recording, and I think listening to that outweighs any added energy the performance gets from being live. Live energy may be good in an improvised jazz solo, but for pop music all you get are uneven performances played too loud. Musicals are different, because the live performance gives you a visual element missing from the recording, and there are no drunk fans trying to sing along. Les Miserables is back at the National Theatre this winter -- I may o... - Thursday, August 25, 2005:
Musical Motives I give my last music presentation at work today, on the history and sounds of Jazz. Doing three presentations in a row was a lot of fun, but I'm glad it's all over so I can go back to doing nothing with my afternoons. I have the bad habit of signing up for too much stuff when I'm in a slow, bored period, and then wishing I were bored again when I'm insanely busy. While recording samples for my presentation, I rediscovered just how much I enjoy a jazz chart that cooks. I don't really like combo jazz at all (the kind of jazz that evokes a small ensemble in a smoky room playing inaccessible melodies for their own amusement), but the sound of a solid big band chart is easily my favourite type of music, edging out a... - Tuesday, August 09, 2005:
Untitled Post giantStepText = "Though you've played at love and lost\nAnd sorrow's turned your heart to frost\nI will melt your heart again.\nRemember the feeling as a child\nWhen you woke up and morning smiled\nIt's time you felt like you did then.\nThere's just no percentage in remembering the past\nIt's time you learned to live again at last.\n\nCome with me, leave yesterday behind\nAnd take a giant step outside your mind.\n\nYou stare at me in disbelief\nYou say for you there's no relief\nBut I swear I'll prove you wrong.\nDon't stay in your lonely room\nJust staring back in silent gloom.\nThat's not where you belong\nCome with me I'll take you where the taste of life is green\nAnd every day holds wonders to be seen.\n\nCome with me, leave ye... - Thursday, August 04, 2005:
Untitled Post I'm giving Jem's Finally Woken CD a solid three-stars. For the sake of interaction, I will let you, the reader, decide what the maximum number of stars should be. As I mentioned in an old post, Jem's music is like a mix between Dido, Butterfly Boucher, and Tali. All her tracks have catchy beats and interesting vamps, and she has one of those high wafty voices that is only annoying 25% of the time. The major problem with the CD is that all the songs have very interesting ideas but don't really follow through on turning them into hit songs. Each song has a point which just cries out for a new melody or some change of pace, but instead, a previously-heard section is just recycled. The songs would even... - Wednesday, July 13, 2005:
Untitled Post Visitors seem to crawl out of the woodwork whenever I talk about music, so today's post will consist of random whimsies about the music in my mind and on my playlist. A faux 70s pad sound can turn a mediocre song into a catchy one, like Black and White Town (325KB MP3) by the Doves. You can forgive a lot in a song when it sounds a little retro . I'm a sucker for that Chase credit card commercial featuring Five for Fighting's 100 Years . It's so shamelessly over-the-top sentimental that it works. This doesn't mean I'll get a new credit card though. I think Love Machine (580KB MP3) by Girls Aloud is ... - Thursday, July 07, 2005:
Untitled Post Since everybody loves a good list, here is my list of ten well-built songs (I hesitate to call it a Top Ten list, since there are inevitably other songs that I've forgotten). A well-built song need not be the greatest song in the world, have the deepest message, or even be one of your favourites -- it's just a song that's solid from start to finish. It isn't too long or short, it doesn't get old, it's well-crafted, and it says what it needs to say, maximizing the potential of whatever style it's in. Here are my picks, in roughly chronological order (with Amazon samples): Monkees - Pleasant Valley Sunday Beach Boys - God Only Knows Huey Lewis - Power ... - Wednesday, June 29, 2005:
Untitled Post With their new album, X & Y , Coldplay has chosen to stick with what works rather than be adventuresome, and for the most part, it succeeds. The CD has twelve tracks and a hidden one dedicated to their hero, Johnny Cash. To me, Coldplay has always been about the sound first, and then the lyrics second. They excel at creating a mood using just a wash of sound (a technique that most people who dislike their music find boring and repetitive) and use Chris Martin's vocals as a solid hook. A few of the songs on this CD have already started appearing on the radio, like Speed of Sound and Fix Me . Almost all of them are very strong alone, but they don't necessarily function well as an album. Becaus... - Wednesday, June 22, 2005:
Untitled Post Music scholars say that repetition is the key to Western music. Nowadays, repetition is the bane of popular music. Pop and rock songs get longer and longer, mainly because the artists or producers decided to repeat a chorus one too many times. The Stereophonic's Dakota is good, for the first three minutes. Edie Brickell doesn't need to be nattering on about what she is for five minutes, and Finger Eleven should have cut its One Thing song down to the core fifteen seconds. No one gave a rat's ass about what would've happened if he traded it all, so why would they care the ninth or tenth time they regurgitate the question? It's not even that hard to disguise your repetition. Change a couple notes here... - Monday, March 21, 2005:
Untitled Post I've been listening to Origin of Symmetry , an import album by Muse, and as usual, I think it's really good. The first half is more promising than the last half, and there are no "hit" songs on it, but it's a real album (something you don't find often these days). One of the things I like about Muse is that their music is accessible and hard-hitting while still remaining artistic and musical. Also, their songs are more heavy-handed than angry and they get some neat effects out of their instruments. This album is definitely more "noisy" than my favourite album, Absolution , but it uses noise to the fullest effect. Songs are tied together thematically and sometimes through shared ostin... - Thursday, January 13, 2005:
Untitled Post A few months ago, I listened to First of the Gang to Die by Morrissey and thought it was catchy with a very unique lead voice, even though it was kind of a stupid song. Based on that, I picked up two Morrissey CDs out of a bargain bin, You are the Quarry and The Best of Morrissey . After listening to these, I can say that Morrissey is the king of pretentious, unmemorable music. He wastes his great voice on pointless anti-establishment songs with lyrics like these: America your head's too big, Because America, Your belly's too big And I love you, I just wish you'd stay where you is In America, The land of the free, they said, And of opportunity, In a just... - Thursday, December 30, 2004:
Untitled Post Today's CD review will be of Muse's second album, Showbiz . The feel of this album is very different from their fourth album ( Absolution , previously mentioned), but the style is unmistakably Muse. This album is a bit more edgy than Absolution and makes more use of noise as a musical element. The tunes are catchy though not always memorable, and the falsetto is actually very powerful, especially at the end of the song Showbiz . Their non-edgy stuff works well too, though sometimes they sound too much like a frat rock band . Here are a few samples for your listening pleasure. As usual the sound quality has been greater reduced for downloading: ... - Wednesday, December 29, 2004:
Untitled Post Two of my recent CDs are Paul Weller's Wild Wood and the Scissor Sisters' self-titled CD. The Weller CD, I picked up because I liked the retro 70s feel of his single The Bottle (see the entry from Sep. 20, 2004). It has a very mellow laid-back groove to it, and is great background for relaxing and/or "chilling". I liked Paul Weller when he was fronting The Jam, but his solo stuff is great, even if it has a totally different feel . 5th Season (234KB MP3) I got the Scissor Sisters CD because a lot of their songs get air time on XM. Their music is a blend of campy pop, dance, and the pretentiousness of 80s rock . Take ... - Monday, October 25, 2004:
Untitled Post I'd forgotten all about posting CD thoughts until I got a reminder email this morning. I like all three CDs I bought on the 12th. Smile is good but the only word I can use to describe it is "meandering". It's very artful and cohesive, but spends far too much time playing with tempos and styles to be as catchy as Pet Sounds . After listening to it several times, not much about it sticks in my head, and it's not one that I'd listen to regularly or burn tracks off of. I like the Dido CD, Life for Rent , simply because it's easy to listen to and Dido has one of the few pleasant female voices in recent years. You can put it on in the background for hours on end while workin and it's pretty good... - Monday, September 20, 2004:
Untitled Post Today will be another "What I'm Listening To" update. As before, most of these songs are available for purchase online, and you can also hear more samples from the groups on Amazon.com. The downloadable fragments here are greatly reduced in sound quality. (MP3 295KB) Bottle by Paul Weller, a song from this year which nicely captures that 70s funk/soul feel (MP3 486KB) Butterflies and Hurricanes by Muse, a song that actually has some musical acumen behind it (MP3 268KB) First of the Gang to Die by Morrissey (MP3 255KB) I Love You by Dogs Die in Ho... - Wednesday, September 08, 2004:
Untitled Post For today's update, I've decided to post fragments of music which have caught my attention in the past month of listening to XM Radio. Most of these songs are available for purchase online, and you can also hear more samples from the groups on Amazon.com. The downloadable fragments here are greatly reduced in sound quality. (MP3 406KB) Snapshot by Kinky (MP3 144KB) The catchy, but ultimately useless Crickets Sing for Anamaria by former Spice Girl, Emma Bunton (MP3 270KB) Crawling Up a Hill by Katie Melua (MP3 503KB) The interesting, but a little annoying &nb... - Tuesday, December 09, 2003:
Untitled Post For those jaded souls who aren't already shocked and awed about my recent listening choices, here's another. I've recently been listening to the music of the French pop star, Alizée. Despite its sometimes annoying tendency to double as dance music, europop is fun to listen to because it's patently harmless, upbeat, and easy on the ears. Alizée arrived on the scene three years ago and easily has a better voice than any Britney Spears clone the US recording industry could produce. Plus, the lyrics of her songs have a poetic, almost campy, flavour to them which reminds me a lot of music from the 80s. I've included a sample clip and lyrics from the song, À Contre Courant , in case yo... - Tuesday, April 22, 2003:
Untitled Post There was a great vocal jazz concert this evening in Opperman, featuring the twenty-voice "After Five" vocal group and Leon Anderson's small jazz combo (not together). Leon even sat in on a few tunes to show off his rockin' drum acrobatics. Soloists who aren't plagued with thirty-second note envy Solos with a tune and a direction A good bari sax player Trumpeters who can sound like they're playing flugelhorn Small group jazz vocals Unpretentious solos Closed position vocals planing chromatically Male soloists that don't come off as cheap lounge singers Fun tunes The font &nb... - Tuesday, February 25, 2003:
Untitled Post For today's news update, I will tell an interesting story about some music I wrote over five years ago. Is it a tale of incredible coincidence or do I have some extraordinarily subliminal sense of pitch recall? You be the judge! In the fall of 1997, I wrote a four movement work for solo trumpet and wind ensemble called The Hero . I had just finished the first movement and thought it would be clever and artistic to write the fourth movement next, creating book ends to contain the inner movements. Below, is an excerpt from the "A" melody of the fourth movement, taken from the trumpet line towards the middle of the movement. The Hero Movement IV, solo trumpet part, m. 61 &n... - Wednesday, February 19, 2003:
Untitled Post One thing I'm going to miss about leaving music as a career is the relative cost of books and research materials. As a software engineer, you have to constantly keep up with new technologies, and the books required to self-teach those skills can run anywhere from $30 to $60. For my current project, I have eight books on different langauges, programs, and technologies on my shelf. All of them will be speaking to others at some point in the life of the project and none of them are replaceable (I even have a ninth book on the way from Amazon that covers some spots I was shady in). For the cost of just those eight books, I could have eaten seventy-two delicious meals at Popeye's, or rented eighty-six movies at Blockbuster. &n... - Sunday, February 02, 2003:
Untitled Post The problem with "amorphous solid" music is that the lack of a pulse or even a sense of forward drive eliminates the incentive to stay focused on the piece. It becomes easy to slip in and out of conscious attention to the music, and one starting point becomes as good as the next. The phenomenon can almost be compared to movie scores, except that those scores are supposed to function in that way as an ulterior support to something else going on. Of course rhythmic interest isn't the only solution or the surefire solution to combat this, but it's probably the most accessible way to retain the audience. I think I've heard enough flute and chamber strings now to last me for the rest of the year. ... - Saturday, February 01, 2003:
Untitled Post The New Music Festival is merrily rolling along. I've gone to three concerts so far and they've all had their good points, although the student works' concert was incredibly long. The Penderecki Quartet performed four string quartets last night and sounded excellent, despite a violinist with inebriated Muppet performance syndrome. I also think I've discovered a reliable formula to creating contemporary music, which requires equal parts of the following musical fragments: silence followed by a Schwanter-esque piano hook and Schwanter-esque percussion use a solo flute playing a melody with a contour similar to a cross section of the Himalayan Mountains' topography violin, or multiple str... - Saturday, January 04, 2003:
Untitled Post I'm back in Tallahassee, the land where people turn on red from middle lanes and where they advertise sales that ended the day before. The break was good for me -- I read some books and watched some movies, but most of my time was spent finishing up my thesis. I finally completed the music back on December 28, so this month will be occupied with editing and correcting the visual score. If you have an eye for detail and want to make a few bucks, give me a holler and you can help proofread later in the month. Labyrinth (15:45, 14.4MB MP3) There's also a MIDI file on the Music Page (under Volume III) for people without a cable modem, but your sound card may convert the extramusical effect... - Tuesday, December 10, 2002:
Untitled Post A burst of activity hit the SCI listserv this past week, resulting from this semiliterate troll: Competitions really suck when you pay for postage and entry fee and everything and than they dont award you NOTHING or even give you the feedback you at the very least deserve on your piece. You guys know what Im saying? The people that judge these things probably only have degrees and dont know anything. This triggered a slew of intelligent responses, as well as the usual complaints to shut up, and the replies that also used to opportunity to advertise personal sites and music. We're now in the second week of the activity spike with people complaining or posting 'me too!' while others advocate a me... - Sunday, December 08, 2002:
Untitled Post I wrote about a minute and a half of keepable material this weekend, so I should finish my sixth movement tomorrow or Tuesday. On the downside, I've been working on this section so closely that the blasted motive is stuck in my head. Ostensibly I'd like to get a good chunk of the seventh movement done before I leave since it will only be about half a minute long. I'll post another MP3 of the work in progress on Wednesday. My long term goals are to finish the eighth movement the weekend before Christmas and the ninth movement before New Years'. That will give me the month of January to edit the score with an aim for a late February defense. If things go accordingly, I'll be done with my Masters' by Spring Break. So k... - Thursday, December 05, 2002:
Untitled Post I finally got around to a much needed haircut this morning. Thesis composition is going slower than expected, though now it's a matter of knowing what needs to be expressed and not knowing how best to put it to paper, rather than having a dearth of ideas. My major obstacles are placement, timing, and order right now -- I know what materials I'll be using for the last four movements. The problem with composition is that, unlike other fields, you can't step away for a while to resolve a lingering problem. In another field, the time away can subconsciously bring about a result, but in composition you've got to keep plugging away without break or else you'll just distance yourself further away from the solut... - Saturday, November 02, 2002:
Untitled Post So next year at this time, I'll be a software engineer in northern Virginia. That doesn't mean I'll stop composing by any stretch of the imagination. I just decided that this is what I need to be doing for the forseeable future, based on a combination of factors. Here are the questions I posed back in August: Do I have enough inspiration to compose for the span of an entire career without rehashing old material? Probably so, depending on how prolific I would be. I started off in high school with scads of new music every month, but have continuously slowed down since then. This probably reflects more attention to detail than lack of inspiration, but it's important for me to realize that composing for... - Saturday, October 12, 2002:
Untitled Post Part V of V Chorus and Orchestra : The Broadway recording is done with a reduced orchestral set, using synthesizers as if it were a standard pit. The full orchestrations of the other two recordings give the music a lusher, more believable quality that's also more enjoyable. The Complete recording is the cleanest of the three, which lets you hear every note of the score as it was meant to be heard, but the impact of the live performance on the Tenth Anniversary recording can't be beat for excitement (even though it's a little sloppier than the other two). At the End of the Day, Broadway (MP3, 572KB) At the End of the Day, Complete (MP3, 571KB) At the End of t... - Friday, October 11, 2002:
Untitled Post Part IV of V None of today's characters are major enough to hurt the musical through bad casting, but a good choice always adds a little extra oomph to the recording. Gavroche : All three actors of Gavroche are about equal in their roles. The Complete recording's Gavroche (Ross McCall) has the most believable accent, but makes his death scene ridiculously protracted, gasping for air after every syllable. Young Cosette : The Broadway actress is the most believable as a singing tot, but Marissa Dunlop (C) has the prettiest rendition of the character's only song. Hannah Chick (T) does a decent enough job but stumbles a few times (probably because it was live). &n... - Thursday, October 10, 2002:
Untitled Post Part III of V Marius : David Bryant (B) would make a good Marius in Les Misérables: The Muppet Edition . Otherwise, there's nothing particularly memorable about his performance. Michael Ball (C, T) does a great job in turning the role into a believable character, where it was falt and boring on paper. His performance on the Complete recording is slightly better and less wavery than the later Tenth Anniversary recording. On the latter, he sounds more like he did in Webber's Aspects of Love . David Bryant, Broadway (MP3, 316KB) Michael Ball, Complete (MP3, 281KB) Eponine : Frances Ruffelle (B) is my favourite ... - Wednesday, October 09, 2002:
Untitled Post Part II of V Inspector Javert : In my opinion, Javert is more crucial to the success of this musical than Valjean. You can't have a game of cat and mouse without a compelling cat; try imagining The Fugitive with Keanu Reeves in Tommy Lee Jones' role. With this in mind, there is no doubt that the best Javert actor is Philip Quast (C, T), whose voice and demeanor illustrate the character's obsession with the letter of the law over the intent of the law. Some of the most compelling scenes on the recordings are the result of Quast's exceptional work showing Javert's conflict between anger and remorse. Terrance Mann (B) is good enough, but his delivery is weak, and he often sounds like ... - Tuesday, October 08, 2002:
Untitled Post To break the monotony, I'm going to spend a few days doing a review/comparison of three major recordings of the musical, Les Miserables by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg. I'll be looking at the Broadway Cast recording (B), the Complete Symphonic recording (C), and the Tenth Anniversary recording (T) only, since I haven't gotten around to buying the London Cast recording yet. If the mere thought of musicals makes your pores explode, you can come back on Sunday, as I should be finished by then. I myself wasn't even remotely interested in musicals until about six years ago when a close friend listened to them tirelessly. As I've mentioned before, I'm more interested in those where the music is pa... - Friday, September 27, 2002:
Untitled Post There's an absolutely brilliant use of music in a scene from The Sopranos, Season 3 Episode 1. Close to the very beginning is a two minute montage showing various FBI agents tailing each member of the Soprano family. The first clip of the montage rolls into high gear with Mancini's theme music from Peter Gunn , but the second clip suddenly segues into the Police's Every Breath You Take . As different scenes play through, the two songs fade back and forther between one another, until both are played simultaneously, with all their harmonies matching up. This continues over a repeat of the lyrics "I'll be watching you" mixed with various horn rips from Peter Gunn , while FBI agents sneak into the S... - Thursday, September 26, 2002:
Untitled Post I recently picked up the latest Dave Matthews CD, Busted Stuff , which is a revamped collection of the discarded songs that preceded Everyday . The music is perfectly agreeable, and there's plenty of catchy vamps, but in my opinion, it still doesn't quite measure up to the earlier recordings. It was definitely better than Everyday , which I thought was just a catchy collection of faux pop charts that didn't have much thought go into them. The CD also comes with a free DVD of something Matthews-related, but I haven't gotten around to watching it. - Tuesday, September 24, 2002:
Untitled Post With so much time to devote to composing this semester, I find that I'm generating the same amount of music as I did in the past. Instead, I tend to throw out or refine ideas much more than I used to. My 'crap' folder is already burgeoning with discarded ideas, and that's something that normally doesn't happen until late in the semester. It's still to early to tell which approach results in a better final product though. "Mine is a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds." California '06: Terminator vs. Meathead? - Tuesday, August 13, 2002:
Untitled Post For me, the hardest part of composing is the transitions. I find it incredibly difficult to write a transition that actually belongs where it is, rather than one that eventually sounds okay after more listenings. I have to write transitions as I go, rather than writing the meaty parts and putting the tendons in later. Without variation, the first draft is always too square and blocked, while later drafts run the risk of being too short (Having a short attention span tends to foster jumping quickly between good ideas, and I have to work to make myself linger in an area I think the listener might be bored of). There are still a few transitions in the second movement of my string quartet that are worn like second-hand pants, ... - Monday, April 15, 2002:
Untitled Post Last night's concert went well if a little too long. With fifteen works on the program, it weighed in at about two and a half hours. There were some nice points to the music though and everything went pretty well. It was also nice to see several freshmen getting their works performed, and most of the ones I heard definitely had something to work with for the coming years. Badinage went pretty well, although there were a few spots that I could have done better. Generally, I've received positive comments about the structure of the piece and the performance, but I'll wait until I can listen to the recording before I make any judgements of my own. Apparently, Professor Kubik's words on the matter were, " That's an am... - Friday, April 05, 2002:
Untitled Post Steve Reich: WORKS 1965 - 1995, Part V of V Disc nine of the set contains excerpts from his theatre piece, The Cave which was for a mix of performers, prerecorded voices, and video clips. I really didn't care for the audio portions that I heard -- perhaps the boring sameness of some of the samples is helped by the visuals in the actual production. Disc ten contained Proverb , Nagoya Marimbas , and City Life , the last one being his most recently recorded work in the set. Proverb was an interesting vocal work that didn't rely on electronic sampling, but I didn't enjoy it as much as The Desert Music . I found City Life to ... - Thursday, April 04, 2002:
Untitled Post Steve Reich: WORKS 1965 - 1995, Part IV of V The next two discs of the Reich set include New York Counterpoint , Sextet , The Four Sections , Different Trains , Electric Counterpoint , and Three Movements . As a large orchestral work, I found Three Movements interesting, just to see how Reich handles such large forces. I found New York Counterpoint to be pleasant enough, with the final movement being an interesting application of jazz idioms. All of the other works besides Different Trains were interesting but didn't evoke any strong feelings. Different Trains was probably my favourite w... - Wednesday, April 03, 2002:
Untitled Post Steve Reich: WORKS 1965 - 1995, Part III of V The fourth and fifth discs of the Reich set contain Music for Eighteen Musicians , Eight Lines , and Tehillim . These works didn't really inspire positive or negative reactions in me. There was nothing innovative or wowing, but at the same time, I didn't dislike them at all. The only minor note I made was that the ensemble's makeup on Music for Eighteen Musicians grew wearisome towards the last quarter of the work (which is seventy minutes long). Disc six was The Desert Music (1984) for amplified chorus and orchestra. The work is a text setting of poetry by William Carlos Williams, and ... - Tuesday, April 02, 2002:
Untitled Post Steve Reich: WORKS 1965 - 1995, Part II of V Disc two of the set is the hour-long work, Drumming (1971), which seems to be an extended elaboration on a single rhythmic cell in four continuous movements. This was another piece that I found interesting, but not particularly enjoyable. One of the problems I have with works like this is just the sheer magnitude of length involved in going from beginning to end. This grand extension is really necessary for the intricacies of rhythm and pitch to reveal themselves to the listeners, but they have to be willing maintain their concentration for that long of a period. Most of my own work tends to be extremely concise (and usually too concise). As I write, I tr... - Monday, April 01, 2002:
Untitled Post Steve Reich: WORKS 1965 - 1995, Part I of V I listened to the entire 10-disc set of CDs over the span of a couple days last week, and felt they were interesting enough to do a disc by disc review of various works. I've had no previous exposure to any of his music, and the thoughts below are my instinctual feelings based on one or two listenings -- definitely not serious criticisms or analyses by any stretch of the imagination. Disc One includes four early works, Come Out , Piano Phase , It's Gonna Rain , and Four Organs . Come Out (1966) and It's Gonna Rain (1965), were both interesting experiments, but I wouldn't be quick to label ... - Saturday, March 30, 2002:
Untitled Post These past couple days have been Reich days. I checked out the 10-disc retrospective of Steve Reich's music from the library and I'm almost done listening to disc 10 right now. I'll try to post my thoughts on the set and particular songs tomorrow. In my quest for more familiarity with modern composers, I also wanted to check out the 10-disc boxed set of John Adams, but the library seems to have lost it (like the fifty other odd CDs that "just don't seem to be on our shelf anymore"). I'm not sure how you lose a 10-disc set -- it's not like you can hide it behind another CD or run it over with your car without noticing, but I guess when you work in the library, anything's possible. Here's another revamped MIDI theme which I ... - Thursday, March 28, 2002:
Untitled Post After a couple months of starting and stopping, I finally finished The Muse that Sings over Spring Break. The book itself isn't so long; I just wanted to read it slowly to absorb everything. The book is a collection of interviews rewritten in prose form, from a wide assortment of living composers on their creative process and thoughts about composition. From its forty dollar price tag, you can tell that it's a niche market affair, and non-composers probably will not appreciate it as much as composers. I found the book to be very interesting, if not informative. Most of the process ideas presented are so personal that it would be worthless to attempt to mimic them, but it's inspiring to see how other peop... - Tuesday, March 05, 2002:
Untitled Post One thing I really miss in modern popular music is the "satisfying ending". The rise of radio as a lucrative transmission medium brought about the extinction of most song endings. Radio stations try to limit or remove all dead air from their broadcasts, so most employ the practice of fading in a new song as the old one fades out. Fewer modern arrangers use endings at all now, since they'll most likely never be heard on the radio. Songs that stop but don't end tend to fall into two major categories. The first type concludes on a neverending vamp which gradually fades into obscurity, as if the writers knew they had something catchy but couldn't figure out a clever way to end (think KISS and "I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night")... - Wednesday, February 27, 2002:
Untitled Post Today is Paige's twenty-third birthday. Happy Birthday! The head of the VT music department, John Husser, sent an e-mail out to all music majors today. Here's some excerpts: This is to report to you on the status of the departments current situation. As you know, budget cuts are here and real. The College of Arts and Sciences was given their target reduction for the next two years, and the college then gave the department's their reductions. We were assigned a 10% reduction. This is different from department to department and this is what I was expecting we would be called to do. This amount has nothing to do with our "value" to the college or the university, only our ability to "pay back". This pe... - Tuesday, February 26, 2002:
Untitled Post Leave it to my dad to cut everyone off at the pass by sending an e-mail out pre-thanking us for our birthday well-wishing. It's definitely the efficient way to go. Happy Birthday! In the 2003 budget at Virginia Tech, it's been decided to cut the Arts budget by 10-14% across the board. Among the changes initiated by the VT Music Department in response to this was the firing of two new professors, the jazz professor who replaced Chip McNeill this year and the choral director who replaced Kevin Fenton two years ago (Fenton, by the way is now a professor here at FSU). The jazz program was essential kaput last year when Chip left to head the department at Florida International University and took his wife, jazz vocalist ... - Saturday, February 16, 2002:
Untitled Post There are no major advances in game music technology on the immediate horizon. Since sound effects stole the spotlight, the major hardware improvements have been to achieve clearer sounds at higher sampling rates, and to standardize three dimensional sound positioning. In an interview with Blizzard composer, Andrea G. Pessino (see link below), he expressed his desire to make game music more interactive, and went on to describe, almost exactly, the imuse system abandoned by LucasArts in the early 90s. In the meantime, game music is in a "more of the same" valley, where music comes second to flashier graphics and more realistic explosions. One reason for this could be the general decline in popularity of adventur... - Friday, February 15, 2002:
Untitled Post The Nintendo 64 console was released in 1996, although I didn't buy one for myself until 2001. Although it boasted exceptionally improved graphics and sound, it really didn't have much to offer over the SNES in the music department. Soundtracks written for the N64 were very reminiscent of the old MIDI tunes on the PC, with decent but unspectacular sound patches. Because this was the last console system I bought, I don't know where music stands on the other major consoles, like the Dreamcast, Playstation line, xBox, and GameCube. Meanwhile back on the PC, game music tended to fall into two major categories: traditional scores and ambient music. With ambient music, composers try to create an uninvolved composition wit... - Thursday, February 14, 2002:
Untitled Post As PC sound quality improved, game composers increasingly sought recognition of the legitimacy of their art. Throughout the early 90s, various attempts were made at making game music more mainstream and accepted. In some cases, composers attempted to create more serious music. LucasArts' Loom, which was released in 1990, sported a MIDI soundtrack with nothing but arrangements of Tchaikovsky works, culminating in a final section played to the tune of Swan Lake. Michael Land's music for The Dig (LucasArts 1995) was almost a movie soundtrack, with a blatantly apparent (and intended) Wagnerian influence. Some companies weren't so successful in their attempts to legitimize or commercialize their music. Sierra On-Line rel... - Wednesday, February 13, 2002:
Untitled Post After years of pretending that newer and better consoles didn't exist, Nintendo finally released the 16-bit Super Nintendo in 1991. With its launch title, Super Mario World, it was clear that music synthesis had evolved greatly since the NES. Gamers were treated music as complex as that found on the PC, but with sound quality better than any of the mass-market soundcards. Full orchestral scores were now possible, with no loss of tracks when the action became intense. Actraiser, released in late 1991, set a new standard for video game music, and remains in my mind as the best soundtrack ever composed for the SNES. While most other games still employed cookie-cutter variations on old arcade standards, the music in Act... - Tuesday, February 12, 2002:
Untitled Post 1989 brought a remake of Pinball Wizard in the form of the awful Fred Savage vehicle, The Wizard. The movie was essentially a ninety-minute commercial for Nintendo's biggest selling NES game, Super Mario Bros. 3. SMB3 was also one of the first NES cartridges to boast a larger internal memory chip. Since upgrades could not necessarily be performed on the system itself, Nintendo made its games better over the years by packing more processing power into its cartridges. Musically, this allowed for primitive canned samples of various percussion instruments, which made the soundtracks more realistic (MP3, 267KB). As you can hear from the sample, Nintendo music was still organized according to the original spec, wit... - Monday, February 11, 2002:
Untitled Post Following the video game crash in 1984, the Nintendo Entertainment System trickled into the US in 1985, and was the first major system to feature continuous soundtracks throughout its games. It's widely recognized as the console which elevated game music from simple beeps and whistles to an art form composed of beeps and whistles . The anthem from Nintendo's launch game, Super Mario Brothers, continued to appear in variations throughout the Mario series and even spawned lyrics when it became the theme song to the horrible television show based on the game. " Swing your arms from side to side. Come on, it's time to go. Do the Mario!... " (MP3, 203KB) Early Nintendo game... - Sunday, February 10, 2002:
Untitled Post And now for something a little bit different... To break away from the tedium of updates about my real-life escapades, and to reach a balance between my computer-related and music-related news items, I'm devoting this week's News page to the music of video games and computer games. I'll trace the evolution of game music from the Atari to today's common PC games, with more emphasis on highlights from my own gaming past. A Giant supermarket in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania recently put up an advertisement reading, "In honor of Black History Month, we at Giant are offering a special savings on fried chicken" . There's nothing appropriately relevant in the month of February to game music, but it's a topic t... - Wednesday, February 06, 2002:
Untitled Post I've never understood the appeal of extended drum solos in jazz. Although drummers demand equal footing as a soloist in many groups, their lack of pitch really hinders their improvisatory work. I'd rather hear a concise 12-bar drum solo, rather than one of those drawn-out tumors of music that sometimes crop up, especially in combos. I think the worst case of overdone drum soloing is Buddy Rich's playing on Channel One Suite . The version made for commercial recording is brief and to the point, but in a live edition from 1977 I have, the drum solos (and a poor misguided sax) stretch the twelve minute piece to over twenty-five minutes in length. The secondary assistantship assignments I have now really aren... - Thursday, January 31, 2002:
Untitled Post Every night when I'm in the practice room, I hear some anonymous freshman trumpeter down the hall, practicing the same tired three measures of the Hummel trumpet concerto at a plodding, methodical tempo. He or she never varies from the strict tempo and notes, but just keeps playing it over and over again without any sign of improvement. It seems like many performers in the practice rooms recognize the importance of reduced-tempo practicing, but never actually exploit the opportunity to get better. Hopefully this trumpeter will either get better or give up sometime soon... I'm looking for a nice, compact title word that describes an outlook on life where you just don't give a damn. "Carefree" isn't quite right and "happy-go... - Sunday, January 27, 2002:
Untitled Post I've discovered an interesting trick to increase motivation for composing, though it only works if you tend to listen to your previous work a fair amount. Myself, I listen to what I'm currently working on when I wake up and before I go to bed, as well as other random times throughout the day, even if I don't plan on composing at the time. That way, my current work is always on my mind at some level, and I find that it makes problems a little easier to solve when I finally do sit down to write. I often find it difficult to begin a writing session, even though I do fine once I've actually stopped procrastinating and begun. The trick is this: At the end of a composing session, add a measure or two wherever you've stopp... - Saturday, January 19, 2002:
Untitled Post I've added two more CDs to my list of reviews, both movie soundtracks this time. Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favourite Danny Elfman scores and is a really cohesive, unified affair, although it does go a little overboard with its predictable rhyming couplet scheme. Danny Elfman actually sings the lead role of Jack Skellington on the soundtrack and in the movie, which is also worth your time. I also like the music from Conspiracy Theory , even though it's entirely predictable and somewhat clichéd. It works well against the screenplay even if people don't consider it to be a serious musical work. I had pedagogy yesterday. We don't learn anything by doing undergraduate ear training drill... - Saturday, December 29, 2001:
Untitled Post It's always interesting to listen to compositions after an extended hiatus. Parts that seemed to work before become painfully facaded and parts that were border-line acceptable organize themselves into keepers or discards. On the first listening, I have to sort through the lines that make me say, "Wow, I wrote that!", and the parts that make me say, "Wow, I wrote that??", and then hope that there are more from the former category. The string quartet's first movement seems to have weathered the vacation pretty well, and the changes I made today were additions rather than deletions. Now it's time for the surgical tweaking and creating a readable score. I always tend to write in the same manner -- I put notes down in F... - Sunday, November 11, 2001:
Untitled Post There was a joint senior trumpet recital this afternoon, but it was not particularly well-done. The Kennan was just plain sophomoric and the Ewazen, which is one of my favourite trumpet works, didn't fare much better. The performance lacked any kind of soul or drive -- there were no peaks or valleys, just a flat sameness throughout. It was like someone slapped the Ewazen around and told it to behave and be polite. I have to give the girl credit -- it takes balls to put a piece as demanding as the Ewazen on any program -- but when you're taking notes down the octave after only forty measures and there's still about six hundred measures to go, something's gone wrong somewhere! She did have a very pretty tone though, and the pianist play... - Monday, October 22, 2001:
Untitled Post I probably did just fine on the history of music theory test this morning. Again, it's not that it's a horrible class; it's just that too much time is spent on minutia, to the detriment of the big picture. My composition professor likened music theory history to a long, dark tunnel. You start at one end with a dim lantern that allows you to see a little bit of what's written on the walls. You can spend a long time staring at one part of the wall, but if you don't keep moving, you'll never get to the end. Also, it's going to take more than one trip through to figure out all the connections. In my current class, it's like we have to study, memorize, and spit-polish tiny portions of the wall. Then again, maybe I just have less of ... - Sunday, October 07, 2001:
Untitled Post Having grown up in a strong band tradition, the music I compose tends to be strongly accessible -- definitely not esoteric by any stretch of the imagination. It's not that I hate dissonance and non-tonal music, it's just that I don't really feel like its the proper language for my voice. Writing music or telling a story in a language that's not your own is like walking around in someone else's underpants. I think there's far too many possibilities in tonality to be ignored, and probably won't change my mind until I've exhausted all of those possibilities. To me, studying contemporary music is more important for redefining the boundaries of dissonance in my writing, rather than introducing a whole new way to compose. By the... - Friday, October 05, 2001:
Untitled Post Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes modern music just gets to me. This afternoon, we had a guest forum with freelance composer and FSU graduate, Stephen Montague. The lecture he gave was articulate, opinionated, and full of good information, but while I respect how well crafted his music seemed, it really didn't do anything for me on any level. As I glanced around the room and saw various students smiling or nodding with comprehension, I had to wonder just how many were faking it. The list of excerpts Stephen distributed was for a mixture of acoustical and electronic playback, often with a tape accompanying a live ensemble for sounds they can't replicate. He's also done off-the-wall commissions including a work for 1000 performers on... - Friday, September 07, 2001:
Untitled Post I wrote a rough draft of compositional pedagogy ideas as they relate to technology, and was surprised at the number of ideas I had festering just below the surface. I've always been interested in it, but I didn't realize that over time, solid ideas were formulating without my conscious knowledge. I'll probably post that draft in essay form once the kinks are worked out. I'm in the middle of the book on arrangers I got from the music library. Its a collection of articles and informal interviews with a variety of jazz arrangers and composers from fifties and sixties, and it's really quite good. The language is occasionally mangled to retain verb tense, but it's very thoughtfully written and provides some nice insights into t...
