Category: MY MUSIC

Another SuperCollider Thing

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I’ve been busy over the weekend and wasn’t able to advance much in the book yet, but I did play around with SuperCollider a bit more. Here’s some recorded evidence: My old iMac was running out of memory near the end, which is why stuff got all glitchy near the end. Not for this reason but for other reasons, I’m upgrading to a newer Mac, so I won’t have that issue soon.  For now, this feels a lot like twiddling knobs on an analog synth back in the day, which is undeniably fun… but I’m hoping that before long I’ll …

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Learning Supercollider 1: Starting Out

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So, a while back I saw a few videos of Dan Tepfer’s where he was exploring ideas like algorithmic music and visual representations of music. One video that really grabbed my attention was his exploration of canons and automated canon playback, which he posted on Instagram:   View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dan Tepfer (@dantepfer) At the time, I was struggling to write a prolation canon for this string quartet I’ve been slowly, off-and-on working on for the last month or so. Sadly, the rules Tepfer mentions don’t apply to prolation canons, only to simpler sequential …

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Old Interview Surfaces

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The other day, I stumbled onto an old interview done with the band I played with from 2002-2004. This was from spring 2003—20 years ago! It was only posted on youtube last year. Anyway, I’ve posted it to the Dabang Band subpage on this website, if anyone’s interested. You can see a very young me talking very vaguely about our plans for the band (plans?) and you can also hear some clips from some of our songs, the way we did them live, as well as everyone else answering questions we didn’t know were coming. Er, uh, um… well, the …

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Monk Suite, Part 3

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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 …

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Murder in the Cathedral

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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 …

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“Oh Day Away”—a Mouse Guard Song

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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. 

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