Category: MY MUSIC

Learned in the Studio

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Recently I stumbled upon a track online that happens to be the first studio recording I ever made. It was a guest appearance on a folk-pop album titled Xylon I, by a local musician named Xylon Cozens, and I play soprano sax on a single track. It’s odd: there’s basically nothing online about Xylon, or the album, even though it was recorded in 1995: I guess that says something about my own personal sense that the Internet caught on about that time: it did for me, but everyone was still on dialup, and it didn’t seem apparent that the Internet and music would necessarily …

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Back Onto Flute

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Ah, new challenges. I’m back onto practicing the flute again, and it’s driving me bananas. I probably would have been playing the soprano sax instead, except that I haven’t made it out to the sax repair shop on the other side of town, so that cleaning swab is still stuck in the neck… so flute it is.   It’s hard to master this instrument. Practicing makes me dizzy. I’m constantly tempted to put off learning the proper (crazy, sax-altissimo-like) third-octave fingerings, because I can get over half that octave out by overblowing the left hand of the second octave. I …

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Daerijeon Soundtrack–Insight Strikes!

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So, I had a realization the other day, while trying to wrap my brain around this project I’m working on. Essentially, the insight came in two steps. I was talking to my wife about creative ways to get around the fact we’re missing clips and video content that was originally mandated in the screenplay for our current film project. One of the points I made was that, since we cannot reshoot anything, it’s up to us to think creatively about how to rework the script to tell the story, while taking up the challenge of turning the missing pieces into …

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Monk Suite, One Page at a Time

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I’m no sure how many people out there are really tracking my notation projects, but this is an update about my current one, notating “Monk Suite”–an arrangement of tunes by Thelonious Monk for jazz quintet and orchestra that I put together as an undergrad student.

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One More Composition: “When She Dreams of Moonlight” (1994)

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I’ve added another composition to my Music page: it’s an underwhelming score, in fact a royal mess, but I figured it was worth notating in Musescore for the practice, as well as to capture the way I thought about music and composing in 1994, about halfway through my formal music studies. I suppose you could call it my attempt to compose “Third Stream” music: that is, music that combined jazz and classical approaches to create something new and alien to both sides of the divide. Here’s a copy of the score, though it’s pretty useless without the tape (and still …

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