Its been a slower week than I would have liked for a number or real life reasons, mainly the weather has been unbearably hot and we have no air conditioning making computer time just about impossible and rather dangerous – for computers. 101F yesterday and I suspect another one today out here past the [...]

Continue reading " Composing Status Update #4 "

Went book happy last weekend, as I had used up my bag of psycho-reads, and was still hungry after that awful Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly which was almost a total bust.
in my queue now from Borders:

Mozarts Brain and the Fighter Pilot – by Richard Restak, MD.
A Users Guide to the Brain – by John J [...]

Continue reading " Cognitive Book Feast "

Vincent amazes me every time I visit his work, and reaffirms my belief that being utterly precise doesn’t get the creator closer to great art. You can check out more of his work (if not all his work) here.

Continue reading " van Gogh "

I noticed there wasn’t anyone hanging outside on the corner this last week trying to listen in to my music I am writing and I soon discovered why. Seems John Adams was off in London for Proms #50 and his premiere of his DR ATOMIC symphony or whatever you what to call it.
You can [...]

Continue reading " Adams is Out of Town – I Can Relax "

Well, its been an interesting week in blog land. In addition to forcing myself to keep up a series of posts here in ComposerBastard city, I spend a lot of my time checking up on my brothers and sister musician and composer to see how they are feeding. Sometimes, their views infuriate me, [...]

Continue reading " Blog Wrastlin’ "

Back-story: the previous week I had taken a smaller thematic section that I had written and tried to use another means to create rhythm for a same stream of melodic pitches. This would hopefully create a prolonged variation of the same melody so it could be utilized in other sections of the work [...]

Continue reading " Composing Status Update #3 "

Once you get to a point where you want to create some sort of mock-up or prototype of your score, you need to dish out a major bucks to put together some sort of electronic orchestra to hear and to record a demo of it. Unfortunately, technology has not reached a point where the [...]

Continue reading " Orchestra Samples "

From Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihali, to quote:
The creative process has traditionally been described as taking five steps.
The first is a period of preparation, becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.
The second phase of the creative process is [...]

Continue reading " Five Steps of Creativity "