Intense listening this week. Imagining how I can bring out certain qualities of the interaction of three streams of notes using orchestration in this sectino. I found a lot of potential. Listening more closely…finding the length of the section may be too long, so I redesigned it by cutting the distribution in [...]

Continue reading " Composing Status Update #17 "

Retracing my steps to BART yesterday afternoon, I heard the recognizable call of a flock of parrots in the trees. For the first time, they appeared to be in a location that was accessible enough for me to get a closer look. And so, I climbed the hill to take a closer look [...]

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From Alex’s book…
…”Everything begins in mystique and ends in politics”, wrote the French poet Charles Peguy in 1910. Morton Feldman, the maverick modernist who loved Sibelius, applied this epigram to twentieth-century music, describing how grandiose ideas are made ordinary with the passage of time and become fodder for a power struggle among ideologues and [...]

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In Alex Ross’ book, a thought from Benjamin Britten:
…In his Aspen speech Britten provocatively compared the regimentation of culture in totalitarian states to the self-imposed regimentation of theavant-garde in democratic countries. Any idelogical organization of music, he said, distorts a composer’s natural voice, his “gift and personality”…
Well, he’s only half right in my ears. [...]

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Found in Alex Ross’ book, a quote from Roger Sessions’ belief that composers had to…
…abandon resolutely chimerical hopes of success in a world dominated overwhelmingly by ’stars,’ by mechanized popular music, and by the box office standard, and set themselves to discovering what they truly have to say, and to saying it in a manner [...]

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Added the third line into the mix and performed a very careful review – as a listener. I really love this particular section. I’m not sure others will like it – the repetition can be annoying if you don’t know how to relax your mind and just listen – no particular concentration…just relax [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving.
Outside of taking a long day-pause to reflect on our luck and happiness, I love this holiday as I get to eat. This year, I’m going to make my first full turkey, including dressing from scratch, so no laying around waiting for Whole Foods to be microwaved. So, no musical [...]

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I’m a lighthouse lover. Someone posted this time-shot of Pigeon Point Light on Digg yesterday. I lost the link, so I can’t find the guy who did it to give him credit. He stood in the drizzle for quite a while to get it:

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