Vestiges, mvt. 3, and wrapping up 2014

Hello friends!

The year is coming to an end, and as promised I am checking in to post about my progress this past month. I have worked on my song cycle for 29 of the 31 days of this month, and I am really enjoying my daily music writing practice. I hope to keep up daily writing in the new year.

As for the song cycle I am writing, it now has a name: Chansons Innocentes, after the set of five poems written by E. E. Cummings, which I am setting for soprano, clarinet, and piano. I am very excited about this work. I am not quite finished with the first complete draft of the entire cycle, but I am pleased with the progress I have made toward its completion in the past two months. In December, I wrote most of the remaining song called "little tree," which will be the third of five songs in the cycle. I am eager to share my sketches with Emma Rose Lynn, for whom I am writing these songs.

Finally, before I sign off for 2014, I received in my email inbox today a link to an audio recording of Vestiges, third movement, which was performed back in October by the Saint Helens String Quartet. I was delighted with the musicianship of the performance, which I was unable to attend in person. I uploaded the audio to youtube so I could share it with you:

This movement is the third of four, which I wrote for Robert Lombardo, in memory of his late wife, poet and playwright, Kathleen Lombardo.

Checking in: Weeks 3–4 of NaMuWriMo

It is the last day of the month, as well as the last day of NaMuWriMo, the challenge I set for myself to write music EVERY DAY for at least 30 minutes. Traveling around the Thanksgiving holiday threw me off more than anticipated, and I must report that I have written music 28 days out of the possible 30--missing two days. Still not bad--and certainly GREATER THAN ZERO!

So I now have sketches for the following parts of the song cycle I have been writing:

Prelude (partial sketch)

I. "in just" (about 2/3 completed)

II. "hist whist" (complete)

IV. "why did you go (little kittens)" (complete)

V. "tumbling-hair" (complete)

Postlude

So to complete the cycle, I have to finish composing the prelude and first song ("in just") and write the entirety of the third song of the cycle ("little tree"). This is not a bad level of productivity for just one month of composing, almost every day for short periods of time. In fact, I surprised myself in being able to write as much as I did. Cool!

Other lessons I have learned through this challenge:

• Writing something is better than writing nothing. GREATER THAN ZERO!
• Sitting at the piano and writing nothing is better than not trying at all.
• I had very few days that felt entirely uninspired, and even on those days I managed to scribble down a couple of half-hearted measures. I never wrote NOTHING (how's that for a nice double negative?).
• I do best when I write in the morning before I go to work.
• I really do enjoy writing music. 
• I shouldn't let fear of criticism prevent me from writing music.

So what is next now that this challenge (and month) is done? Well, for starters, I still need to finish writing this song cycle. I have set a reasonable goal for December to finish my rough sketch of the remaining movements, put the entire cycle into music notation software, and revise it a bit. Then I will send it to the soprano for whom I wrote the piece and see what she thinks. Hopefully, she'll like it, and we will be able to make some plans for a future performance. I'll post again before the end of the year to make good on my goal and STAY ACCOUNTABLE. And who knows what challenges the new year will hold!?

Checking in: Week 2 of NaMuWriMo

So far, so good, my friends. I am 16 for 16! So far this month I have written music for at least 30 minutes per day, which is the goal I set for myself. Cool!

At this stage, I have written almost three complete songs. At the rate I am going, I may actually be able to finish the entire song cycle I am writing (settings of five poems by E. E. Cummings for soprano, clarinet, and piano) before the month is over! Awesome!

I have been keeping track of my daily progress. Here is my log for the past week:

Date	Minutes	Measures
10-Nov	32	7
11-Nov	30	7
12-Nov	30	8
13-Nov	31	5
14-Nov	32	4
15-Nov	32	12
16-Nov	41	9
TOTAL:	228	52

So it seems I have increased my productivity since I last posted. I am averaging fewer than five minutes for each measure I write, as opposed to my last post when I averaged closer to six minutes per measure. (Granted the song I was writing then had more intricate counterpoint than the songs I wrote this week, but still . . . whatever!)

Thanks for reading my post. I appreciate your support!

Checking In: Week 1 of NaMuWriMo

As of November 9, I am nine for nine out of days in which I composed for a least 30 minutes/day. Cool! So far, I am meeting my goal. I don't quite write five measures a day every day (some days I write as few as three partial measures, but other days I have written as many as 14 measures!) But--whatever--it isn't about the number of measures I write, it is about writing something, anything, each day.

And the best news is that I finished my first of five songs for the song cycle project. Awesome! I am going to wait until next month to put it all into the computer notation program (right now it exists as handwritten pencil on manuscript paper, but it is A COMPLETE SONG MANUSCRIPT). And now I can move on to the next song in the cycle. I already have a partial sketch of ideas for a vocal melody, but at my next session I'll move forward on it.

What I have learned by doing this daily practice so far:

• I write when I make the time for it in the morning.
• I started out very slow at first (3 measures, then 4, then just 3), but now that I am in a regular habit, I am more productive (i.e., write more music) with the time I have.
• It helps to have a supportive partner. Every morning she has walked the dog or given me time and space I need to create. Thank you, Kate!
• For the first time in awhile, I am REALLY ENJOYING composing and I look forward to each morning session I have.

I'll report again next week, with hopefully similar success!

Statistics for week 1, plus the weekend, if anyone is interested:

Date	Minutes	Measures
1-Nov	31	3
2-Nov	32	4
3-Nov	31	3
4-Nov	36	3.5
5-Nov	37	6
6-Nov	40	13
7-Nov	31	4
8-Nov	32	5
9-Nov	50	14
TOTAL:	320	55.5

Directives for overcoming creativity-sucking demons

While I am doing NaMuWriMo (and hopefully beyond the month of November), the following directives will serve as mantras for me:

• Stop judging. Start creating.
• Commit to your projects and finish what you start.
• Stop worrying about what other people think.
• Honor your ideas.
• Stop making excuses.
• Prioritize creativity.
• Stop weighing yourself.
• Stop being critical and/or jealous of others.
• Put your music out there!
• Stop taking yourself too seriously.
• Share your work with others.
• Stop comparing yourself to others.
• Stay accountable.
• Just do the damn thing.

I know there is all this music inside me just waiting to come out.

I'm back . . . with NaMuWriMo

It has been many months since I last posted, and mostly because I didn't have a vision for the blog after I'd finished my first personal challenge. I'd more or less run out of music I wanted to share with my followers. I did manage to write two new songs this year--one of which may make an appearance on the blog at some point, AND I have a lot more chamber music I've written I'd like to feature at some point, too, BUT . . .

The purpose of this blog post is to JUMPSTART my MUSICAL CREATIVITY. After reconnecting with my lovely and inspiring Aunt Lynn and then having another meaningful conversation with my friend Jenifer, I decided I need to TAKE ACTION. Luckily, the month of November is just right around the corner. Now what, you ask, does November have anything to do with jumpstarting one's creativity? Well, everything.

My aunt has participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for several years now and she has written several novels through it (and she has written many other awesome things, short stories and more!). The general idea is you set a goal and work toward it each day to get closer to your goal of writing a novel.

I'm no novelist, but I like the idea of setting a goal and working toward it every day. I have done the same thing for my professional life (I am an academic, and the only way I have found to get stuff published and research done is to write a little and engage the project EVERY day). The problem for me is that I have let my musical creativity go. Not cool. I am a songwriter and composer, yet for a variety of reasons, I have not been honoring my musical creativity. And I am unhappy with my lack of engagement in what actually matters to me a great deal.

Enter my idea for November: NaMuWriMo, National Music Writing Month.

Here's the plan: Write music for at least 30 minutes each day, with the goal of writing at least five measures a day. Post weekly blog updates to STAY ACCOUNTABLE.

I'd love to continue work on a particular project I just can't seem to finish--a song cycle, setting of five poems by E. E. Cummings, for soprano, clarinet, and piano. I promised soprano Emma Rose Lynn I'd write this piece for her a year and half ago, but crippling self doubt and laziness have prevented me from completing the project. I may not finish the entire piece over the course of November, but I am certain if I stick to the plan, I'll be a lot closer to seeing it through than if I don't try.

So starting November 1, I'm getting back to my staff paper, my pencils, and my piano. Expect weekly posts.

Vestiges, mvt. 4

For now, this is my last post on Vestiges, the string quartet I finished writing in January. I am toying with the idea of making further revisions, mostly concerning making the rhythms more interesting, but WHATEVER, this is how the piece stands at this time.

For the music geeks out there, this movement is a near-exact palindrome (after its midpoint, all the notes and most of the rhythms are presented backwards), and it uses its primary motive in a bunch of permutations (inversion, retrograde, in canon, you name it, I did it).

My longer-term goal for the piece is to find a venue for live performance, hopefully a new music festival at some point over the next year.

At any rate, this is the last movement of Vestiges (MIDI realization):

Hope you enjoy it.

In Memoriam Phillip A. Chandler

I interrupt my regular postings of the movements of Vestiges (don't worry, movement 4 is coming in next week's post!) to share with you a piece for two flutes, clarinet, and alto saxophone I wrote several years ago, titled In Memoriam Phillip A. Chandler (1974–2008). This piece is going to be performed at the Society of Composers, Inc. Region VIII Conference to be held in Tacoma, Washington this weekend.

I wrote this piece in memory of a friend who died from complications related to AIDS. Phillip was known in his community of Mount Vernon, Ohio as the man who volunteered at his local soup kitchen. Phillip went out of his way to make all guests feel welcome and added beautiful table settings so the guests could eat their meals with dignity. I only knew Phillip for a few short years before he passed away, and I wished I could have gotten to know him better.

The recording I share with you below is from a concert of new music I presented at Kenyon College in 2010. The performers are Julia DeNiro ’10, flute; Ayako Tokuyama ’11, flute; Robert Milnikel, clarinet; and Evan Axelbaum ’10, alto saxophone.

I look forward to having another opportunity for hearing this piece live.

Vestiges (mvt. 3), Creative Barriers, and an Apology

I have allowed far too much time to pass without posting (that is the "Apology" portion of this post)--not cool, I know. There have been reasons.

First, I have allowed other more urgent (but not necessarily more important) things take up my time. In the last week of January I started teaching again after a lovely eight-month sabbatical, and I am afraid I had forgotten how difficult it is to balance work and creative life outside of work (as well other important aspects of life, like self-care and quality time with loved ones!). At any rate, I put the blog aside, and I also have not lived up to my goal for Challenge no. 2, that is engaging one of my creative projects every day. I am not happy with myself for this.

Second, I received some constructive criticism on a composition I had written (details need not be disclosed) that I was not anticipating receiving, and ultimately it upset me more than I should have let it. For a moment, receiving this unanticipated feedback closed me up, and I didn't want to engage my projects. I have since gotten over it, for criticism (whether solicited or not, whether welcome or not) is part of life and part of sharing one's creative work. So I am going to continue to post, after these several weeks of self-reflection and in spite of not living up to my goals associated with Challenge no. 2.

Creative barriers aside, in the time since my last post, I managed to write two more songs as a means of therapy trying to cope with stresses of my academic life. I don't have recordings of them (yet), but they may be making a cameo at some point.

And a quick thank you to my friend and former student, Alex M., for urging me to post movements three and four of Vestiges. It is nice to know you are listening, and that you want to hear more. Thanks also to my Aunt Lynn, who is a constant inspiration.

Without further ado, movement 3 of Vestiges:

This is my favorite of all four movements.

Vestiges is finished!

My string quartet, Vestiges, is finished! Cool! I completed the final (fourth) movement last week, and just finished revising the piece as a whole. Awesome! The score is ready to be printed and bound, and I should also consider submitting it for inclusion at a new music festival this year so it can be performed. The trouble sometimes is that to submit materials for such festivals, a recording is usually required and MIDI realizations don't really capture the piece. Too bad I don't have my own personal string quartet at my disposal for recording a reading of the piece! Whatever!

At any rate, this week I will share a MIDI realization of the second movement with you. This particular MIDI rendition sounds quite synthesized. Real string instruments would sound a lot different, but the track gives you a basic idea of what I have written. Here is a description of the movement:

The primary material for this movement is a driving sixteenth-note theme, first introduced simultaneously by all four instruments played in octaves. This theme appears throughout the movement in many forms—inverted, played backwards, and in canon at various intervals between the instruments. Its form is in two large parts; the second section begins with an imitative treatment of the main theme in retrograde (played backwards).

Here it is:

Time for Challenge No. 2

It is the new year, and upon completing Susannah Conway's "Unraveling 2014", I decided that my theme for 2014 is CREATIVITY. Last year’s themes, for me, were CONFIDENCE and POSSIBILITY, which resulted in me starting this blog.  A year ago I began with a challenge for myself—to record roughly (without succumbing to perfectionism) some of my favorite songs I have written for myself over the years.  Posting just about every week until the end of May, the project had played out and with the busyness of the end-of-spring-semester and several weeks of summer travel, I let the blog go, wondering in the back of my head what my next challenge would be, if I would continue the blog, and what my next post(s) would be like.

Over the course of the months that followed and in tandem with my unplanned hiatus from this blog, I did less songwriting, but more composing.  I began writing a large-scale four-movement piece for string quartet.  This is the largest creative project I have taken on since my last sabbatical leave in 2008–09.  As I opened myself up to being more creative (basically whenever I made time to sit my butt in front of a piano with a pencil and some manuscript paper), I found several musical themes would emerge, which seemed to work perfectly in various permutations, and I was writing a serious piece of music.  I was out of practice, but the more I allowed myself to write, the more easily it all came back to me.  I am dedicating the piece, titled Vestiges, to my first composition professor, Dr. Robert Lombardo, in memory and honor of his wife, Kathleen, who passed away at the end of the summer.  I did not engage this project consistently, but rather worked in spurts, fits and starts, here and there, and by the end of the year, I had written three of the four movements I had planned.  That's pretty slow work, but better than nothing.

Fast forward to January 1st and my new theme [CREATIVITY] for the New Year . . . I decided that since my creative projects are important to me, yet for whatever reasons I let other things that are less important take precedent, I need to make my composing/music making/songwriting, i.e. creative projects, more of a priority.  So fitting with this year’s theme, my new challenge—Challenge no. 2—is to engage one of my creative endeavors EVERY SINGLE DAY even if only for a few minutes.  That means even if I have let the day get away from me and it is after 10 pm and I still haven’t engaged a creative project, I wait to go to bed until after I have done so.  And so far, it is working.  I am almost finished with the last movement for the string quartet, and as I type this blog post, we are only five days into the New Year.

For this new year, then, I plan to post about my progress toward this new challenge for myself, hopefully the tracing the genesis and evolution of my creative projects—right now involving some serious composing—as well as some musical content when appropriate.  Thanks for reading, and I wish everyone a 2014 filled with CREATIVITY.

I leave you with a MIDI realization of the first movement of Vestiges.  Caveat: MIDI realizations are generally awful and do not resemble live performance, but at least it may give you a basic aural idea of the music I have written.