Category: MY MUSIC

Musical Sketches

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So, I’ve just posted some sketches for the soundtrack I was working on in early March for my wife’s film project–that is, 대리전/”The Proxy War”. I won’t be doing any more work on the sketches till we have a rough cut, but I figured it might interest some people. This film is SF, comedic but also action, and yet in a lot of ways it’s conceived as being in the mode of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which means that narration is a huge part of how the story gets across. By the way, the soundtrack material has taken up so …

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Sopranoed! WX5ed! Fluted! But… Argh!

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UPDATE (27 March 2014): Hold on! Looks like my students were wrong, and there is one sax tech somewhere in Saigon. Problem is, I’ll have to track him down myself: I went to the music shop my student mentioned to see if they had something that could remove the stuck swab, and they told me that, no, they can’t, but there’s a saxophone repairman in District 10 who can do it. They called him and he confirmed that he could. The catch? They tried to tell me I couldn’t go there myself, I had entrust the horn to their care. …

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“Portraits” Completed, and More Thoughts on Musescore

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I mentioned recently that I was working on digitizing my compositions from back in my music student days. Well, I finished another piece earlier, and decided to upload it tonight: Portraits for Two Bass Clarinets (1995) by Gord Sellar (Complete score in PDF format) There’s a recording of the premiere performance of the piece (and, I think, maybe the only performance so far) over on my Music page. The score here has minor corrections–but only minor ones, including some dynamics sketched in that should have been in the original, but somehow got left out–and there are a few small errors …

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Brief Note-(ation)

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UPDATE (28 Feb 2014): Digitization completed. The file is available here, along with my comments on the software and more. UPDATE (27 Feb. 2014):  Well, I’ve finished the first movement, (sparse) dynamics and all. Here it is!  When I’ve finished all three movements, I’ll update again, combine the PDFs into a single file, and add it to the page where the audio is posted. The second and third are much shorter and simpler than the first, but it may take a little while for me to get around to it. (And not that I expect it’ll ever get performed, remixed, …

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Akai EWI 5000 announced

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UPDATE (25 Jan 2014): Video of the thing in action. Doesn’t reveal much, but I’ve added it anyway: Original Post: I plan on getting back to my promised post about Korean education, but this news deserves a little post, so: Although I have a Yamaha WX5 waiting for me in Seoul, my newest piece of musical kit is an Akai MPKmini, which I picked up to help me get some soundtrack work done for Mrs. Jiwaku’s latest ongoing film project. It’s an SF film, so a spacey, electronics-heavy soundtrack is needed, and the MPKmini is cheap, portable, and versatile enough …

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All Blues

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Another week, another tune. This one’s a classic, and strictly speaking, it’s actually just a blues in concert G. But I was trying to capture some of the original Miles Davis version. (On which all the solos kill me, though I used to focus on the Coltrane; lately, I’ve reached a new appreciation of just how badass Cannonball Adderley was–that’s the first sax solo, for those who are curious.) These days, I’m trying to get better at walking the line between “inside” and “outside”: the more traditional, “tonal” sounding playing that I’ve been working on since picking up the horn …

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“The Logical Question and the Decaying Answer”

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Whew! I’m feeling a sense of immense achievement, probably a little out of proportion to what I’ve actually done. Then again, this is a blog, so… I haven’t composed any new music (in terms of writing it down, I mean) in a couple of decades, but I have finally finished inputting the first of the pieces I’m notating with Musescore. Here’s the first page: I’m pleased because Musescore also lets me export audio for the pieces. The renderings are not perfect–honestly, they show the flaws of the piece, in that a human touch is really necessary for the piece to …

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Learning Curves, Apparent and Hidden

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Back when I was a music student, it wasn’t all that unusual for people–especially students–not to have a computer at home. That’s what computer labs were for, so, yeah, my first few years of internet-use all took  place in campus computer labs. Campus computer labs tended to have only the sort of software everyone needed, so while the music notation software Finale has been around for ages, I never really learned to use it properly: the only computer I knew that had it installed was a tiny little Mac Classic in the “electronic music lab”–a tiny, windowless room mostly taken …

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How High The Ornithology, or, The Contrafact

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Well, I was slowed down a little by a crazy ear infection, but I’m back. Here’s my take on two tunes, which are actually kinda-sorta one tune: “How High the Moon” (1940) by Nancy Hamilton (lyrics) & Norman Lewis (music) “Ornithology” (1945) by Charlie Parker & Benny Harris My take on this pair of tunes is flawed: I had to slow the backing track to make it playable with both tunes, my attempt at Bird’s famous Ornithology solo is haphazard, and the sound quality is something I’m not happy with… but I still feel like I have achieved something, compared …

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