Tag Archives: Music

Sharing Something: Picking a Project

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Music, Sharing Something, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

In the comments of last week’s post, I realized a series of disappointing projects may have made me reticent about really devoting myself to any new ideas for fear of that same disappointment. I also resolved to use the space here to sort through the ideas for pieces I do have, to see if I can’t pick one to actually see through.  These ideas range pretty wildly in terms of personal investment required (both time and money), as well as effort I’ve already put into them.  I like these ideas, but pretty much all of them have some big hitch that has kept me from just diving in.

Two Crickets
The idea: Two performers sit on stage. Each holds a box. Each box contains a cricket. The piece is simply listening to the polyrhythms created by the cricket chirps as they are influenced by the body temperatures of the performers. (for a more detailed explanation, see this post)
Why I like it: It’s a simple piece that draws our attention to simple musical and biological phenomena. Everyone responds well to this idea when I explain it, but I think it also operates in this bizarre head-space as far as actual performance goes. Who are the performers here? The crickets? The people holding the boxes? The piece simply exploits natural phenomena the crickets and humans involved have no control over.
Why I haven’t finished it: I think my main reason is that I have no performance lined up for the piece. I like the idea of having these boxes at the ready, but motivating myself to fabricate them has been difficult without a deadline looming. I think I’m also a little worried that the performance wouldn’t really work. Uncooperative crickets have the power to make any performance just two people sitting there, and I’m a little worried that the jostling of being carried on stage might be enough to keep them quiet. I’d hate to put the time into manufacturing these boxes if the piece turns out to be impossible to perform.

The Singing Box
The idea: Basically, a geodesic dome covering a speaker. Each triangle of the dome has a pipe sticking out of it, and each pipe is a different length. The speaker would generate a dense chord or even white noise, but the pipes would reinforce specific overtones within that sound. As you move around the piece, you hear different overtones being reinforced by the different tubes.
Why I like it: The simplicity of this idea appeals to me. It is a static sculpture, but thinking about it as a piece of music draws attention to the temporal aspect of observing a sculpture. As you move around the piece, it becomes interactive, changing specifically to when and where you move. Each person will have a slightly different experience when they observe it. I also think it could look really handsome.
Why I haven’t finished it: Geodesic domes are complicated. Completing this project will require a significant time investment. Generally, time isn’t an issue, but I’m not even sure this concept will work. I’d hate to put all those hours in only to find that the piece really is static, and that it doesn’t matter how you move. Additionally, I have no idea how or where I could display a piece like this.

Cross-Stitched Flute Piece
The idea: A short piece written for solo flute (or flute duet) is cross-stitched into one (or two) very long piece(s) of cloth, like a ribbon. In performance, these ribbons would be laid over furniture, landscapes, plants, etc, and the flautists must follow the ribbon as they read from it.
Why I like it: One of the things I’m really interested in is score preparation, and specifically making the score a work of art in and of itself. This piece does that beautifully, making the format of the score a vital aspect of the performance, requiring interaction between the performer and the performance space, which makes for unique performance experiences.
Why I haven’t finished it: Cross-stitching is very time- and labor- intensive. Especially for the scale I’m hoping to work on, this could take months to prepare. Without a performance or even performers in mind, this is a difficult task to motivate myself to do. This is exacerbated by my current tendency to abandon projects after putting a lot of time into them.

Duet for Trumpet and Flag
The idea: A short piece written for solo trumpet is printed on a flag (that is, the score itself is a flag). It can only be played when the wind is high enough to fly a flag.
Why I like it: Another score-as-art piece. I’ve become increasingly interested in incorporating indeterminacy as a natural and necessary aspect of my music. When I can, I like to build it into the score or method of performance, such that the performer is forced to play it differently every time. A billowing flag is not particularly conducive for close, exact reading, so the performer will have to skip and jump around the score in order to continue playing. Additionally, the flag itself will add flapping sounds which are equally unpredictable and unrepeatable. The image of a trumpeter and a flag is tied to those of patriotism (as in a military funeral) as well as those of childhood (as in boy scout camp). I’m not sure how I want to relate to those images specifically, but they are familiar to me, and I don’t dislike the reference in the piece.
Why I haven’t finished it: I’ve actually finished writing the piece. There are a few additional formatting things I want to tweak, but the only thing really holding me back at this point is cost. The three most common ways of manufacturing a flag are digital printing, screen printing, and applique. Digital printing is the cheapest, and could probably be done for around $300. Screen printing probably isn’t that much more expensive, but most companies have a minimum order of 6 or 12 to offset the cost of making the screens. Applique is the most expensive, and I’m not even sure it would be possible with something as complicated as a musical score. I’d be happiest with the look of an applique flag, but the cost for a single flag would probably be approaching $1,000. In the end, without even the prospect of where and when this would be performed, it’s hard to justify even spending the $300 for the kind of tacky digital print.

The Left-Wing Rag
The idea: I purchase a full-page ad in the New York Times, and run a score for a short solo piano piece.
Why I like it: This would people’s attention. A lot of people. The Times estimates its audience to be just under 5 million readers. This side-steps the issues the other projects have with securing performers by reaching out to audiences and performers directly. People could play the piece, or not as they see fit. I like the idea of putting music directly in the hands of the audience, and asking them to play it is reminiscent of a time where that wouldn’t be such a ridiculous request.
Why I haven’t finished it: The cost here is pretty prohibitive (though honestly not as bad as I thought going in). It’s hard to tell exactly what I would pay for an “ad” like this (or if the Times would go for such an idea), but I think it would be around $800. Additionally, I don’t really know what I’d write. I think a piano piece makes sense, and I really like the idea of “The Left-Wing Rag” as a tongue-in-cheek title, but I have never written a piano rag, and don’t really have any interest in writing one. I also fear that much of the attention I’d get for doing something like this would be negative, a backlash from struggling composers who don’t have the money to waste on such a dramatic publicity stunt. In the end, this is a pretty high cost for something I don’t even know people will respond well to.

I’m not sure this was as cathartic as I was hoping. These still have pros and cons that are hard to weigh against each other. It’s not that doing any one of these will prevent me from doing another, I just need to figure out what I want to do now. If any of these speak to you, or you think just make more sense to do, let me know in the comments.

Sharing Something: Film Scoring

16 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Music, Sharing Something

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

In February of last year, I was forwarded an email from the Dean of the Conservatory at my alma mater. He had been contacted by a student who was working on a documentary on the conservation of bats in the Philippines, and was looking for a composer to score his film. As I would later discover, the Dean actually first approached a good friend of mine who, busy preparing his recital and hearing the words “composition” and “bats” in the same sentence, suggested that I might be the right person for the job. Film scoring had never been a particular interest of mine, but this sounded like a cool project, and one that played so perfectly to my pet interests I couldn’t help but agree to take it on.

Of course, when imagined the final product, it had the same impossible level of polish I demand of all of my projects, a goal I’m never able to attain, even when I’m not tied to a hard deadline. For reasons that I’m sure are familiar to anyone who has ever collaborated or worked on a deadline, I had to make a number of compromises to this artistic vision, settling for something much more practical.

Ideally, I would have received the completed, unscored film at least a month in advance of its premiere, so I could sculpt each moment of the score to fit and complement each moment of the film. I realize now that that was a wildly unreasonable expectation, both in terms of the timeline of editing the film as well as the amount of power it would have given me over the final product, but it was what I thought I would have going in. In reality, the film was going to be edited right down to the wire, so I would need to be composing music for film I had yet to see. Gone were the plans to build musical moments out of and around important interview quotes or to even include much melodic material, as this might distract from what was going on in the film. Those ideas were really all I had going in — if I didn’t have the images to inspire me, what was I going to do?

The director wanted simple, loop-able tracks that would reflect the mood of what was going on on screen. He sent an outline for the film, detailing the larger sections and what subjects would be covered within them. This gave me a rough idea of what the music should be like, though without a specific duration for those sections, I couldn’t craft much of a trajectory for the music. This was precisely why he requested the tracks be loop-able — he couldn’t commit to any lengths for those sections until the film was finished — but that tied me to writing music that was cyclical. It wasn’t ideal, but given the circumstances, it seemed like the best solution.

With that stuff out of the way, all that was left to do was actually write and record the music. What does music for a documentary about bat conservation in the Philippines sound like? I wanted something that captured the exoticism of the locale, but that did so without being condescending. I first sought out traditional Philippine music for inspiration, which it turns out is so heavily influenced by Spanish colonialism to be a bit distracting in a film not dedicated to how weird that phenomenon is. Instead, I took my cues from the fantastic Planet Earth score, which manages an exotic sound without pandering by taking a more global approach (which is, admittedly, a little more appropriate for a documentary about the whole Earth than it is for this project, but I needed something). I brought in a slew of instruments (mostly courtesy of my job at the music store), and just started recording.

Having never scored a film before, I was confronted with all kinds of questions, like how do I approach scoring a sequence of footage of caves? Should I use reverb and delay to imply the space sonically, or is that corny? If I don’t use those tools to acknowledge the space of the cave, will that sound dumb? I eventually settled on a set of sounds and effects that I liked, but it required a lot of trial and error on my part.

I quickly started sending the director tidbits of what I was working on, mostly to get his approval for this or that. As the deadline approached, however, the plans for rerecording the rougher takes fell by the wayside, leaving some sloppy music in the final cut of the film. I was also occasionally disheartened by the director’s wishes. I was asked to tone down an effect I thought was particularly apt, or was asked to change the mood of this or that section.

The biggest compromise was in the final section, detailing what is being done and can be done to conserve these bats. The director wanted hopeful, uplifting music for this section, which I thought largely defeated the purpose of the film. Maybe this is an axe I have to grind with most tv shows or movies that detail ecological issues only to end with a reassuring message that everything is okay, but those all end up feeling either like a waste of time (“let me tell you a story about a problem that’s been solved”) or are being dishonest with the audience just so nobody feels guilty. To me, there’s either a problem that needs my help or there isn’t, and suggesting that things are better confuses that issue. Specifically, I don’t have a problem showing that people are working to solve these issues, I just think goosing that message with feel-good music misses the point entirely. The message isn’t “here’s the solution and everything is okay,”it’s “here’s the solution and we still need your help.”

That said, I think my score does tend towards heavy-handedness. Its oppressive, ever-present bass feels dirge-y, and it’s relentlessness is only exaggerated by the fact that every moment of the film is saturated by the score. Listening to it now, it’s also clear that I had been watching a lot of Twin Peaks while working on this score — I more or less cribbed the synth bass sounds from Angelo Badalamenti’s Laura Palmer’s Theme.

This is a bit of an unusual selection for Sharing Something, since it’s a finished project, but it’s one that I’ve been too unhappy with to really share. I imagine the types of creative compromises that chafed me here are common in the world of professional composing (and I did get paid for this, making me a bona fide professional), but I can’t help but thinking how things would be different if I had had more time and resources. This embarrassment is only exacerbated by the fact that this is clearly the work of a young composer; I made a lot of poor choices that distract from the film. I suppose those are both things I’m going to have to get over if I ever hope to, you know, be a composer. Hopefully, sharing the film here is the first step to doing just that.

Sharing Something: Boxes

09 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ideas, Music, Sharing Something

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

When I started my senior year of college, I needed to complete one more piece to fill my senior composition recital. I went into my first composition lesson with two ideas: one for a performance piece of just two performers sitting on stage, each holding a box with a single cricket inside, the other for a string quartet that would be different every time it was played. It wasn’t my intention when I presented those ideas that the cricket idea would make the otherwise outlandish string quartet more palatable to my composition professor, but I suspect that I wouldn’t have been able to move ahead with that project if I hadn’t come up with an even weirder alternative. The string quartet became my favorite piece to date, but the cricket idea has languished ever since.

The idea is built around an old trick used by farmers, campers, and other outdoorsy types to estimate the temperature by counting cricket chirps. As cold-blooded animals, it makes sense that their activity level would be affected by the ambient temperature, but Snopes has a pretty good article on the subject, for those of you who don’t want to take my word for it.  Anyway, as I was falling asleep one night in the summer of 2009, I could hear two crickets from my window, their slightly different chirping rates generating a complex polyrhythmic pattern.  It occurred to me that what I was hearing were microclimates, small areas that differ in climate from the surrounding area.  In this case, proximity to our warm brick house or a cool, mossy patch of soil may have altered the crickets’ body temperatures ever so slightly, changing their rates of chirping.  The temperatures weren’t very different, and in fact, the less different the two rhythmic rates are, the more complex the polyrhythm.  I thought this was a fascinating phenomenon, and set to trying to figure out how to use it in a piece.

My concept left the concept of microclimates and the idea of cricket chirping rates relatively unadorned: in a performance of the piece, two performers would sit on stage, each holding a box containing a single cricket. Hopefully, their slight differences in the body temperatures of the performers would effect the chirping rates of the crickets, creating a complex polyrhythm that might even change throughout the performance of the piece. I say might because I don’t know — the piece never really left the planning stages, but that hasn’t stopped me from planning it to death.

I had tinkered with the idea of soundproof boxes and using microphones, but it turns out that, as a general rule, if something doesn’t transmit sound efficiently, it also won’t transmit temperature changes efficiently. I decided, then, to use thin aluminum boxes that would allow both temperature changes and sound to pass through relatively unfettered. This simplified one aspect of the piece, removing an electronic component, but it added a question of how to start and stop the piece; if there’s no mic to turn on or off, how do you start and stop the sound?

My answer was that the aluminum boxes should be carried on and off stage in larger, soundproof boxes. The piece would begin when the performers removed the aluminum boxes from their containers, and would end when they returned them. I initially conceived of making those boxes out of whatever dense wood I could get my hands on. Serendipitously, as I was returning to this idea at the end of the summer, I discovered that my new job has a pretty impressive wood shop, and more than a few skilled woodworkers willing and excited to help me with whatever projects I could come up with. I immediately set to drafting plans for the wooden boxes, which you can see here. Of course, I don’t have drafting software, so those plans were actually made in Word, which I think is hilarious.

After finishing these plans, one of my handy coworkers suggested that the best material would actually be vinyl decking material, which is super dense and super cheap. The only issue: it won’t take adhesives, so my biscuted and glued design wouldn’t work.  It was back to the drawing board, which is where the project stalled out. I still plan on completing this project, which is unusual for Sharing Something, but it has still been a good long time since I’ve made any effort to do so. There are all kinds of excuses, but I just need to start doing it if I want to get it done. Hopefully, posting the idea here will get me motivated again.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 69 other followers