Sunday, 31 January 2010
Wrote half a song
Sat down at the piano, not really expecting much to happen – and next thing I know, I have the framework for half the final Walt Whitman song down!
Tagged with: composition, music | Add a comment
Sat down at the piano, not really expecting much to happen – and next thing I know, I have the framework for half the final Walt Whitman song down!
Tagged with: composition, music | Add a comment
… conducting Les Noces, Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Symphony of Psalms, from the CD set I bought yesterday – amazing. Also transcribed a bunch of notes I made on the Walt Whitman prose works I’ve been reading, napped and played through two levels of Lego Indiana Jones. And the evening’s not done yet! Now, which CD to listen to while I read the next chapter of the Twyla Tharp book?
Tagged with: listening, music, relaxing, research, study | Add a comment
I actually felt OK at the end of the day so I did a bit of a detour on the way home – I’ve been going nuts being at home so much and really wanting to get out to the shops. I didn’t get to all of the ones I wanted (Foyle’s for a harmony text and Fortnum & Mason for writing paper will have to wait) but I did get to Muji to investigate their filing options (not what I wanted for composition files but at least now I do know what I want) and to the remnants of the HMV sale, where I pounced on the 22-CD set I’ve been thinking about ever since I saw it there before Christmas – 22 CDs of composers performing or conducting their own works. All sorts of people – Stravinsky, Roussel, Britten, Holst, Elgar, Bartok, Hindemith – and a bunch more, and a whole heap of repertoire, much of which I’m not familar with… yet. And of course, this week I actually have the stereo entirely to myself. Wheeeee!
Tagged with: mentalhealth, music, shopping | Add a comment
Looked at the first song again today and fixed up the accompaniment a bit. It felt a bit strange trying to get back into the soundworld of it because the accompaniment is really quite ‘straight’ whereas the vocal line is more like my usual style with peculiar accidentals everywhere. I had a listen too to the two-part inventions I wrote just before I started this, which helped quite a bit and reminded me that I really like those pieces and should get back to laying them out and publishing them properly. Doing some nice MIDI recordings of them too (must install Garritan Personal Orchestra again). So once that was done, I went through both songs and pulled a couple of snippets out to use as a base for thinking about the piano part which will make up the greater part of the third song (only a line or two of text to work with there and I want to balance out the total lack of accompaniment in the second song) so I hooked the laptop up to the piano and doodled about for a bit, gleaning a quite nice rhythmic/harmonic fragment which I think could become useful… at some point in the future.
Oh, and I also got to the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark in Lego Indiana Jones on the Wii – go me!
Tagged with: composition, music, play | Add a comment
A productive day! I’ve started reading and making notes on Walt Whitman’s essays, via my iPod Touch. I typed up and did a rough edit of an article I’m working on. Spent 25 minutes on the 2nd Whitman song in which I managed to iron out all its rhythmic niggles. Balanced my petty cash. And right now I’m installing the Pro Tools Snow Leopard upgrade so the MBox will be installed so I can set up Hyperscribe to allow me to improvise directly from the piano into Finale. Not bad!
Tagged with: composition, editing, music, reading, research, tools, writing | Add a comment
and guess what? It *doesn’t* crash when you quit! I also watched a few of the intro videos – after all, it’s been 4 years since the last version I used – a lot’s changed. and I bought the NumKey app for my iPod Touch, so now I have a numerical keypad with which to input note values and clear bars. It’s been driving me nuts not having one – largely because on the Mac when Num Lock is on, any key which isn’t in the numerical keypad doesn’t work!
Tagged with: tools | Add a comment
Following Twyla Tharp’s example, I made a folder for the Whitman songs, wrote out the texts I had chosen (that almost felt like setting them free from the notebook they were in!), read up a bit in Walt Whitman’s life and followed a random lead which had come to me while Reading the poems (Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars, a book I hated as a child, but on reading the section on Google books I found the descriptive writing at the start to be quite beautiful. Totally lost interest the moment she started in on the narrative though. Guess it’s still not for me). Then I downloaded Leaves of Grass, some Whitman essays, some essays by Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden onto my iPod for some related reading. I can feel ideas beginning to peep out already!
Tagged with: composition, experimenting, music | Add a comment
Experimenting with recipes from my new Greek cookbook and cooking kn the dark because the lights had blown. Felt adventurous and the results were tasty too.
Tagged with: cooking, experimenting | Add a comment
I’ve been putting off upgrading for far too long – 2006 has been driving me nuts – it gets the note-spacing all wrong and crashes every time I close it, and sometimes when I’m not – so nuts that I avoid using it, which of course is a bit of a limitation when I’m trying to compose. But no more! The order is in and the upgrade should arrive on Tuesday. Yay!
Tagged with: composition, music, shopping, tools | Add a comment
Broke out Lego Star Wars today, and I’m pleased to find it’s every bit as fun as the Lego Indiana Jones. I wasn’t too sure about having to start with Episode 1 because I hated all the new films, but it’s heaps of fun, not too hard and has the added bonus of being able to inflict grevious bodily harm ‘by accident’ on JarJar Binks on a regular basis. Very satisfying 
Tagged with: mentalhealth, play, relaxing | Add a comment
