Okay, this is the last of the music projects I’ll be posting about for now. This one’s actually a jazz tune, a lead sheet and a little MIDI playback of the melody, for now, though I’m considering turning it into something bigger.
So, late yesterday night I finally finished getting the notes in for Round Midnight, which is the third and final movement of the Monk Suite. This one took more work than “Well You Needn’t” in some ways. The reason is that this is the one song I originally arranged from a “bad” chart. (Also, a very commonly-used, and commonly-known, I used the old Real Book chart, which has some speculative harmony that doesn’t match Monk’s very well. I think it’s the chord changes Miles Davis used, as mentioned here.) Ethan Iverson’s discussion of Monk’s misrepresentation in general is what made …
This is one more post about a music project that’s ongoing. This one was on hiatus for a long time, but finally is close to done, with all input completed and only dynamic markings needing to be added to some of the pieces. It was back in 1995-96 that I composed some program music for the T.S. Eliot play Murder in the Cathedral. The music I actually composed never got performed—it was too tough for the voice to handle given the amount of rehearsal time we had when I gave them the music. (That’s on me: I didn’t budget enough …
This is another post about an ongoing music project. This one’s a song to which I set the lyrics of David Petersen’s “Oh Day Away,” published in a comic, and how I ended up arranging the song for choir in a traditional style. Unlike with “Monk Suite,” there’s actually a sound clip, albeit just rough MIDI… but it’s something to listen to! It’s a setting of a lovely lyric by Mouse Guard author David Peterson to a melody of my own, arranged for choir.
Though my recent posts are a testament to how busy I’ve been lately—and really, they just scratch the surface—I haven’t abandoned #dungeon23. Oh, no, I may have missed the odd day (and mostly caught up after, but sometimes just with a room and a word or two for a vague idea about what’s in it, but I’m still going. I just haven’t posted in a while because of the size of what I was keying. As you can see, it’s…. an underground complex. Well, mostly underground. If you were able to read the chickenscratch on my previous post, you’ll have …
The other day, I mentioned some work I’d completed in digitally notating my arrangement of some Thelonious Monk tunes. This is a follow up to that post.
This post is mostly working through the challenges that Chat-GPT pose for a general-education TEFL writing instructor. As Stephen Marche noted, “nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.” Well, almost nobody. I kind of am, since I’ve been dealing with analogous issues for decades now. So anyway, these are my thoughts, for anyone interested in them.
I recently mentioned a bunch of ongoing projects, including multiple musical ones. I figured I’d post about a few of those right now, one at a time. This is the first of a few that will be getting posted by scheduling, between today and the weekend. Short version: I’ve been inputting an old arrangement of some jazz tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet plus chamber orchestra using Musescore, and it’s going well. I have no audio of that to share at the moment, but hopefully will in the coming months!
The other day, I added a few assorted RPG-related items over on my itch.io page. The first two are individual scenarios for Epidiah Ravachol’s game Dread, and the third is a set of playbooks for Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco (classic edition, which is available here, among other places). The first Dread scenario is titled “Saigon Ex-Frat Apocalypse.” I wrote it in 2013. “Saigon Ex-Frat Apocalypse” is a scenario for Epidiah Ravachol’s storygame Dread (available here). It’s about expat dirtbags living in a shared house in downtown Saigon who wake up the day after a ridiculous party only to discover that something has gone horribly …
So, I’ve been ridiculously productive lately. I count the following: 4–5 separate projects related to RPGs, 3 related to music, and 1 short story I’ve started working on. I could probably go on at length about all of them, but I was urged to write about one of the RPG-related projects first, so that’s what I’m writing up. I play in a biweekly RPG group organized and run by Jeremy Tolbert. Lately, we’ve been playing Blades in the Dark. If you don’t know what that is, I’ll assume you’re not into RPGs, but just in case: imagine a steampunky London …