Composer for Media and Concert Music
Welcome. The music in my head gets out on occasion. Answers to Punchy; can be lured with stories. Check out the MENU.
Since I have not quite gotten a handle on reposting from my Facebook, I'm old-schooling this copy/paste because I'm just still smiling from this moment.
Highlights from yesterday: first broken bow hair during a performance, and a highschooler told his mom I have inspired him to write music because he "hadn't realized it could be so edgy." That is just the best.
Thrilled to have been invited to come and speak about some of my favorite topics!
Acchio Musica Thematicus!
The fourth installment in the Harry Potter film franchise was a bridge between established composer legend John Williams and others who took up the wand. Explore the ways in which Patrick Doyle retained beloved musical themes and introduced new ones in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with specific examples for analysis of how they relate to what is happening on-screen. Alohomora the hidden magic of musical language in film!
Charts Alive
Recording budgets can be tight, but it can take just one live instrument to bring a computer-based project to the next level. Susan recently began learning how to play violin as an adult, all the better to write for it, and it quickly became an obsession in and of itself. Hear excerpts of a recent work along with demos of how intimate knowledge of an instrument can inform a composer’s writing. Whether recorded by a full live orchestra, an expert soloist, a virtual instrument or something in between, composition benefits from the composer opening new doors of learning.
What comes to mind when you see the term Sonatina?
-Little Sonata
-All the lovely piano pieces I played when younger. (YES! Thanks, Nancy, for that. Especially Beethoven, Kuhlau, Clementi... so many I played or heard)
-Dunno. Something classical?
-A term invented retroactively after the form had already died out
-Most sources describe sonatina as a shorter form of the sonata that can be more loosely based on the form and is generally less technically demanding. However, further digging reveals that after having been largely abandoned in the romantic era, the sonatina re-emerged in the 20th century as no longer a didactic teaching example but a work meant for performance and even freer of formal constraints.
I'm here to tell you I have a new perspective after having written one for the Sonatina Festival.
Sonatina: A fun little idea that continually grows, stretches, and elaborates into a fully realized story with new chapters that present themselves as soon as there is framework to hang from, all the while maintaining the original sense of spontaneity and possibility.
Pianist Karin McCullough has been working with me to polish up my new Sonatina for Violin and Piano, "Parallel Plaid" to be performed at Wedgwood Presbyterian in NE Seattle during the session beginning at 3pm. After tonight's Call for Scores concert, I hope to see you Saturday when we bring this term to life!
The sonatina I've been working on has been given a title. I hate to explain a joke, but in this case, even though it's not exactly a laughing matter, I do want to present some of the clever or punny bits that went into creating this title.
1. "Parallel Plaid" is a riff on parallel play. I first encountered this term when my kids were babies and I was reading everything to do with parenting. Parallel play is something that toddlers do as a way of interacting without really interacting. They play next to each other, each involved in their own thing. A similar concept is "laughing at..." vs. "laughing with..." someone, although parallel play is by no means a malicious thing and indeed facilitates social interaction where otherwise there might be none.
2. "Plaid" doesn't sound like "play" even though the printed words look very much like they almost rhyme. It's very tricks-y, it is. Have you ever discovered a word you'd been pronouncing wrong because you had only read it versus hearing it spoken aloud? Maybe the way you discovered your misconception was when you said that word aloud to someone! This is a nod to the awkwardness of "parallel PLAD" failing an attempt at rhyming with the thing it references. (Plaid itself can also be a little awkward to coordinate with. Is this point all "plaid" out yet? ...get it? getitgetit?)
3. On a meta level, play/played is what the musicians are doing, or have done, with the music on the page. They are engaging in parallel play by each having their own motifs and rhythms that exist side by side. It also has a somewhat angular, geometric feel like the parallel and perpendicular lines of plaid.
If you're thinking that all of that explaining up there seems a bit, well...
The theme of autism asserted itself pretty early on in this work. There are three movements, and the first one that got a name was "Stim." This was followed by "Transist" and "Off-Script."
If you know me fairly well, you're curious about why the subjects of ADHD, ADD and autism come up frequently, on Facebook and elsewhere. Many of these issues are highly interconnected. It has to do with being an ally, with being on one end of the spectrum and acknowledging my friends who live with the other end of it, and with living with certain aspects myself.
You may notice that entries here are few and far between. It is so much more facile to toss off a post or three on Facebook and Twitter in between keeping up with various technical communities than it is to pop over here with specific intent to journal. No news is not no news, it is time filled elsewhere.
The thing that I am overdoing currently is writing a sonatina for violin and piano... or is it piano and violin. There is definitely a dialog between them, and it keeps growing. A theme is emerging of ADHD and the autism spectrum as it relates to communication and work habits. I might know a thing or two about this.
Someone in the industry recently posted a Facebook rant about people who are just a couple of years out of college having no business posing as an expert in their field and making instructional videos claiming such. I think that everyone who saw the post knew exactly who he was talking about. I cringed, because I’ve met both the poster and the target. Not having watched any of said videos, I will nevertheless go ahead and talk about this as if I have a useful opinion on it all.
“Fake it ’til you make it” is an enormous amount of pressure to put on a sensitive artistic soul, yet a certain amount of it is expected in order to help a neophyte gain some confidence and put themselves out there. The phrase “out there” has a ring of danger to it, for good reason. Obviously this person crossed a line and hit a nerve out there with several veterans in the industry. Did he "fake it" a little too much? So it would seem. Yet, he presumably does have some amount of experience to draw on and being fresh out of school affords him a current perspective that can be useful.
I’m particularly sensitive to this as 1) I’m also fairly fresh out of grad school and 2) I have indeed talked very big, and in my case at least, without subsequently being able to publicly follow it up with proof. See, the very first thing after graduating I stumbled into a really big game scoring gig. It was a well known game company about to foray into the video game market and partnering with a local programmer. A lot of fantastic artwork was already done. I was to have a 50-piece live orchestra at my disposal. Pinch me!!! What a dream. I’m on my way! Don’t feel entirely ready for something this big but I’ll get whatever help I need! Alas, the project fell through, something about the higher ups not approving the direction of the artwork. The whole project stalled out, and as far as I know, that was the end of the whole thing. But not before I had already been bouncing around telling everyone “Oh yes, wow, I have a big project that I can’t talk about because of the NDA.” Standard fare in the industry, secrecy. But now I FEEL that it just looks like I was faking it, to anyone who doesn’t know me. That would be bad enough, but in a business where your reputation is about 99.5% of what gets you hired, well… I’ve sincerely had trouble mentally coming back from that, and subsequent projects with the same people did not make much more of an impact to my resume.
I am not at all above doing what I guess would be called grunt work, have done as much of it as has come my way, and will continue to as long as it affords learning opportunities (read: likely a long time.) I just don't want to feel a shadow on my credibility any longer than my neuroses demand. I believe that we can all learn from each other, but that requires trust, and trust can be fragile.
No fooling.
A year ago I fell headlong into learning how to play the violin. Odd as it might seem, given what I do, I’d never actually even touched one before then. I’d made a brief personal acquaintance with the string family sometime in the ’90’s; I'd bought a beat-up cello with vague structural problems that I kept around just for a bit but I didn't have the resources to fix whatever was wrong with the neck, so I never got emotionally invested, nor the least bit serious about learning on a faulty instrument. Skip to a year ago and my daughter was embarking on the school instrument program that starts in 4th grade. She picked viola. I hooked my elbow into hers and picked violin, so that we could learn together.
We were lucky to find a caring teacher both vastly experienced and yet energetic enough to inspire. My daughter has been dutifully going through her books (motivated by the prospect of demonstrating enough responsibility to finally get that potential puppy we’ve been talking about forever.) I, on the other hand, have forged ahead like a bull in a Stradivarius shop, jumping all over the place, to the amusement and partial vexing of the teacher, who just isn’t quite sure what to do with me. My purpose in learning is partly to see what is most practical and fun to do on the instrument in order to better write for it, both solo and orchestral. Wanting to avoid the trap of subconsciously limiting my writing to what I myself can play, I’m trying to quickly absorb bits and pieces of various techniques just to remember that they are out there. Pizzicato, harmonics, double stops, unisons, spiccato, alongside the ubiquitous détaché.
I really did have trial by fire with this, being thrown in with two other adult learners to form the Valiant Trio for last spring’s recital. To get there, we sightread probably a dozen pieces to choose our favorites to work on. Simply keeping up was a miracle. We got through both a soirée and a recital playing from three stylistic periods and had a very warm reception. After that, it was time for me to get back to actually buckle down and improve my bowing. A piano background serves me pretty well in the left hand dexterity, but the bow is another beast altogether. I’ve just joined a community orchestra and the “second string” group is exactly where I should be, highly challenging but entirely doable.
My first lesson was on September 16 a year ago. When the anniversary rolled around I got a bit obsessive about capturing my progress to this point. The thing about recording, though, is that it shows you exactly where you need to fix things. So I would no sooner record something than have to record it again, but better. At some point I have to stop and freeze the frame, though, so gahhhh here it is.
(**I did record some video, but I found the video element a little too much at once, too distracting. Plus, I have a cold. So I ended up recording audio, and the videos are for my own consumption for now, and mostly for bowing improvement.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6wIa5CA88k
*changed my mind and added a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tKACLijHUQ
It has been obscenely long since I've tended to my website. Life gets in the way. I'm a bit more active day-to-day on social networks, though, so if you want to keep in touch there it might not be a bad thing.
Most recently have completed work on a comedy short called Morning Apologies. More about that later!