DISCORDATURA

What it’s from: The hit list. At the moment, it’s a set of cues to be improvised by an ensemble, recorded, and then (conceivably, presumably) tactfully rearranged with some sequencing software to either a) stand alone as a completed piece or b) get played back alongside another ensemble tackling the same set of cues. Here are the roughs for numbers 10, 11, and 14.

My daughter generously contributed the colorization, which I should certainly think will find its way into the finished score.

Of course, that means I have to finish the score.

An aside… Just in case you desperately needed to hear yet another arrangement of Ave Maria, here you go.

[audio:ave maria - string arr.mp3]

Done as a sort of “parting gift” for a nonet of graduating string students a few years ago, this recording is of the read-through of the chart before performing it at their classmates’ ceremony. That’s the thing about doing arrangements: You don’t get to choose the piece, nor do you get to choose the occassion for the performance. The challenge of putting some hint of a personal stamp on projects like these is the fun part.

Soundbites aren’t the only layer of de-composed musical miscellany that litter my life. It’s fairly often – as attempts to jumpstart my creative output are regular, near seasonal occurrences – that amidst the snowdrift of paperwork that follows me from work to my bag to my bedside to underneath the bed to a folder in a box I find scraps of notation. Pieces that were scribbled down in haste, along with the thought that I was assumedly leaving myself enough crumbs of information to be able to get back and complete the idea when more time made itself apparent.

Obviously, there’s no level of information apart from a complete recorded score, preferably with a DVD-like commentary track where I explain in full, ridiculous detail to my future self, just what the hell I was thinking at the time.

Today, for example, I found this gem.

I’m going to take a few to ponder just what in the devil’s name that’s supposed to sound like, and then come back with a recorded interpretation… For laughs or whatnot.

One of the odder bits of phenomena that plagues the musician who composes solely at the computer is the moment when you realize there’s a notable gulf between the music you think you create and the music that just happens to be coming out of the speakers. A tidbit of a progression, hastily recorded, hinting at something worth investigating, slowly gets smothered by disparate ideas and ends up a chroma that’s altogether unintended. What I mean is: How often do computer musicians end up creating music that they otherwise would never listen to? Is recognizing that gulf a moment where one should back up, start over, abandon – or it a moment when one should let go and accept, using your trained faculties to merely bring a level of completeness to the image and let it live on its own merits?

It happened to me, quite often. For example: Here’s one trinket where a series of guitar chords, transcribed into music notation software, spit back out as MIDI and then tracked by a Rhodes softsynth, got blown way out of proportion to the point where I just assumed it was unfixable, and gave up. The question now is: How many steps back do I need to take to start feeling like I’m regaining ownership over the ideas, or is there some strange stubborn way I can work further forward?

[audio:rhodes%20test%20simple.mp3]

My hard drives are riddled with ghosts.

Ever since it became apparent that the computers with which I’d previously saddled with solely cranking out the occasional analysis paper or sheet music score could be tricked into making music – without my even needing to talk to another living soul! – I started conning myself into believing that therein lay the key to throwing myself into a compositional solitude, a hidden den of trial and error crafting, where all would be revealed in finding my voice and from which I would later emerge like a petty illusionist, a fully formed artist, a musician. And through all those headphone-aided expeditions, left in its wake an enormous glut of audio detritus, broken artifacts left over from overzealous digging, spent candy wrappers, fresh ideas left in the sun too long until they grew a bit of fuzz and became destined for the compost bin, yet I kept copying and saving and moving these stupid little files, perhaps as a sad conciliatory gesture in memory of all the “good” stuff that had over time disappeared by accident or out of frustration or just forgetting.

The efforts pretty much fizzled out by 2004, which says a lot about the success of the plan to clarify and distill any sense of a musical vision. Big shock, in retrospect. Who would have thought that working in a closet (literally) would eventually lead to creative atrophy, revealing a personal weakness that I am not some brilliantly driven, self-contained perpetual music machine, but instead, like some lame ficus left neglected in a just-too-shady corner, my work only grows if it’s apparent, tended to in the open. In the end, though, I find I want to get back to it, this composing thing, whatever that means these days. With that in mind, we’re going to try the opposite route this time: A  completely public presentation of my pathetic attempt to get back on the bus and start cranking out some fine art product.

Thereby, this site will serve as a venue for that reentry into the world of creating music. Hopefully, this flipside approach of transparent, work-in-progress reflection, unapologetic and unembarrassed will lead to a better understanding of why there’s something nagging me to make music along with some gentle clues on what said music actually sounds like, and why, and how…

[audio:01-the chestnut lounge.mp3]