Maybe not hugely creative but necessary knowledge anyway. And with the immininent departure of our resident command-line guru, it’s sort of a self-preservation measure too. Should know it anyway though…
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I was a little alarmed, I must say, to find that I actually learnt something (or rather, corrected some misinformation I had somehow picked up) even from the scarily basic first chapter. But this is A Good Thing, I think. Looking forward to chapter 2 now.
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Well not just harmony – Jane Piper Clendinning & Elizabeth West Marvin’s The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis to be precise. (And not just a book either – a book, 3 CDs plus anthology of scores.) It’s sort of a jaunt from ‘this is a treble clef’ through harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form and so on all the way through to ‘this is total serialism and how to write it’. So it’s not like a traditional harmony text, like the dreaded Aldwell & Schachter I had at uni and kept on my shelf for years (now in a box in storage, although I nearly brought it with me – decided to bring Adler on Orchestration instead, which was a sensible move) in the hopes that the data inside it would somehow seep into me like damp without my having to actually open it. I like the look of this new one because it’s not just endless chords, it’s looking at all the elements of musical theory, putting them into context with one another and with recordings and scores of real music. All in all, it feels more composery and less dry. It’s structured as a series of graded lessons, which I’m hoping will make it easier for me to create and stick to a programme of self-guided learning. And best of all, it’s the first step to overcoming a fear I’ve had since first-year uni. The day I understand about Neapolitan 6ths will be the day I conquer that fear entirely. Bring it on!
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OK, so maybe that doesn’t seem so very creative, but anything that helps me get the work I need to done is a good thing. And then I wrote about it (tried to blog it but Blogger crashed. What a surprise) which is both creative and helpful to others who may be struggling.
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So now I have a short list of two books to have a look at: The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis by Jane Clendinning, and Stephan Kostka’s book on harmony which sounds more like a traditional harmony text. Very excited to be getting this project underway!
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I’ve been ‘drawing’ my own manuscript lines for little fragments of idea while working on the Whitman piece. I bought myself a manuscript nib a little while back and it works well – but I’m finding that drawing them in black ink means I have to make my noteheads fairly enormous if they’re to be seen easily – very unlike my usual anorexic noteheads, so I wove my way up to the Atlantis art shop which is just round the corner from my office and bought an assortment of coloured inks which I plan to experiment with: Burnt Orange in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Radiant Concentrated Water Colour (absolutely gorgeous – might have to get some more of these…), Red in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Ink (a lovely rich red, feels very Erik Satie), and the Apple Green Winsor & Newton (a lovely colour, but felt a bit flat after the other two).
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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!
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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!
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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!
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It was driving me mad, constantly typing in new bits of text to convert one site’s URL into another’s – so I wrote a bit of code to do it for me!
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