photo credit: Magnera
ComposerBastard has been pretty creative this week chuggin’ away on his new piano work – every day seemed to generate new ideas under his nose – ideas that were already there but went unnoticed because he was thinking about new material too much or because he talked too much about the materials [...]

Continue reading " Weekly Status Update "

photo credit: Cara_VSAngel
Some might contend the organizational powers that exist in the world have exclusive rights on what is art and what is not.  And some might contend that the public and mass virality makes the deciding factor in what art is and is not.  The first example might apply to artists that range [...]

Continue reading " The Powers That Own "

photo credit: BrainOnFire  Funny, this weekend I did some tremendous work – not to the usual path of righteousness, which is normally bent over graph paper or hell bent on making some vine of counterpoint symmetry work on 8 voices.  Instead, I approached in a way I haven’t done in a while – that [...]

Continue reading " Craft Will Not Save You "

Ok…lets summarize and add a few late weekend thoughts into comments on sketching:
The first two layers or levels of sketching is used to create a lexicon – a semantic or syntactic basis of a musical language that can be used to create many different kinds of works. It’s akin to creating a language. [...]

Continue reading " Snipps "

Uneventful week compositionally. Got pulled away into technical issues and had very little time to look at actual writing – although I did listen to what was accomplished in the last couple of weeks.
The only great news is that this Finale issue I was experiencing with the MIDI / AU seems to have [...]

Continue reading " Composing Status Update #28 "

You’ve now reached level 5 in the game of composing. Summarizing so far: In level 1 and 2, you explored the syntax of musical elements and objects and created raw materials that can be used to construct a broad range of pieces. Using these materials, in level 3, you realized and permutated [...]

Continue reading " Level 5 – Composition "

We’ve performed sketching on the micro materials. We’ve created designs, fragments, and other syntactic elements. And we’ve realized those elements in a number of permutations and experiments that can be utilized into sections and segments.
The next stage is to arrange these into a plan. Now, we might have already been thinking about [...]

Continue reading " Level 4 Compositional Sketching "

OK, so we’ve dealt with the minute, and we’ve created some simple design patterns and materials. The next stage is to start to combine them in more elaborate combinations and larger abstractions. For example, we may take a counterpoint design and combine it with a rhythmic one. We might use different [...]

Continue reading " Third Level Sketching "