Monthly Archives: August 2009 - Page 3

a little looking back

Posted by on August 6, 2009 No comments

I started writing something about a new composition. My focus when things got rolling was on whether or not one would compose differently for a live orchestra as opposed to a virtual one. What got me going was a particularly delicate harp passage that sounded lovely in the virtual world of Logic but that would never work in a live setting without amplification and other technilogical assistance. The path got a little blurry after a while because it became apparent that I didn’t really care if I was writing for the computer or for people, what I was really doing was trying to talk myself out of composing for the orchestra altogether.

That feeling goes back a long way. About 15 years or so. For me, that’s quite a while. There was nothing I loved more than composing for the orchestra. There is somethiing about taking on an ensemble of such magnitude. The are so many possibilities. It’s a playground and if one is particularly inventive there are so few real limitations. There is also a side to it that is like a puzzle. Some ideas are better suited to certain implementations. What solutions can be divined that bring out a given sonority or melody is engaging and addictive. It’s fun.

When I think back on it, I clearly see myself in a practice room well after midnight on a Saturday. The conservatory building was officially closed but those few of us who worked on the custodial staff during the summer knew some things. I sat there in front of a freshly tuned baby grand piano with my notebooks and pens (never pencils! Erasers are for the weak and kill ideas!) with only the vile yellow sodium lights pouring in from the streets to light the room. The sound of the room. The stench of the steam heat. And the absolute focus I was able to summon. There was nothing else in the world. Only those tones coming from the piano and the scratching of pen on paper. My responsibilities were limited to that page and passage. The importance assigned to each stroke of the pen was incredible. It’s horribly naive and pretentious in hindsight, yet the attraction is so obvious to me even today.

Why did I stop? Why did I move on? Was it the fact that after my time as a big fish in a small pond I couldn’t face the reality that I would likely never have a work performed again? Did it have to do with the misguided notion that the orchestra is a creature of the past, a museum for the culture that was? Or was it simple creative wanderlust? That desire to try something new and forge ahead in search of uncharted ground.

In truth, it’s probably a little of each. As I sit and listen to the pristine but mechanical performance of my latest piece as rendered by sampled instruments, I’m struck that I can still imagine how it would sound live. Alive. It moves me to find that after so many years I still feel an affiliation with that art form. The ideas trickle out and they aren’t bad. They stink of unedited inspiration because that’s what they are. And that is how they shall stay.

Maybe I will copy out the score in long hand. An homage to a discipline I have not practiced in some time. An act of love for something that I never really left behind. A gift from that stubborn and pretentious young man in the halflight of a winter evening.

what is othertime?

Posted by on August 4, 2009 No comments

When I registered this domain a million years ago, it was to build a community site for some friends of mine. I knew a lot of people at the turn of the century (been waiting forever to use that one!) who were recently coming out of the academy and into the world beyond. They were artist, musicians, writers, and poets who now faced up to the reality that the world at large doesn’t much care for individual creations in a financial way. That is to say, we were all starting to choke down day jobs.

Throughout my academic career I took it as a given that I would end up teaching at a university. The sheer dollar value of my student loan debt and a few decisions that decidedly limited my options took me down a different path. I quickly realized that pursuing an academic position wasn’t really for me. I would be doing a lot of things that I didn’t much care for in the hopes that I would have time and support for my creative work. Those ideas carried me to the end of my PhD coursework and no further. I left dreams (and nightmares) of the academy behind and did something else.

What is that something else? It’s outside of the scope of this blog. I don’t talk about my job here for many reasons, not the least of which being that this site and the work that I do that is associated with it has nothing to do with my day job. In the Venn diagram of life they don’t produce any intersections. Nuff said.

The community that I hoped to establish fell to the wayside. People found out that day jobs become careers and the old definitions that one has of oneself sometimes fall away and are replaced. The painter becomes an illustrator. The writer becomes a grant specialist. The musician becomes a system administrator. It happens. People change.

For a while the site was a place I would put up all kinds of links and documentation about Free Software for making music. I had some good links and some good HowTos but as I slowly moved away from that way of doing things, I let it drop. I would rather use software to make music than spend my days tinkering with software for its own sake. I still find it amusing to geek out about this or that, but it’s not central to how I spend my time.

From that, I turned this into a blog solely about my music and what I’m producing. It’s going to stay that way for a long time, but I want to add in whatever I can find about the life of those of us who clung to our disciplines in the face of the day job. Those who couldn’t put down the pen or the guitar. People who create in their other time. Subtle, eh?

Here and now I’m a composer and a musician. That’s what this site is all about.

The War of Art

Posted by on August 3, 2009 No comments

I’ve said before that I really don’t like books about creativity that are supposed to help me unleash my inner genius and demolish writer’s block and all that jazz. The last time I mentioned one here my take on it was less than favorable. That said, I came across a reference to The War of Art by Steven Pressfield on Get Rich Slowly (enough links there?) I was motivated to at least look at it. I’m really glad that I did.

My take on doing creative work has always been “shut up and do it.” That is to say, talk less and do more. For every moment spent talking about an idea a moment that could have been used executing it is lost forever. I’ve known (and been) so many who love to talk about being an artist but have no interest in buckling down to do the work. There is a passion for talking about art yet actually sitting down and producing something seems to somehow get lost in the shuffle and discussion of the creative process and all of the wonderful ideas that one has floating around in the ether.

Generally, I find these tomes on creative production counterproductive because they give the reader an excuse not to start the work right now. “I can do it after I devour the inspiration that is bound to be in these pages!” Or, as often as not, the reader can pick up another book that may hold the same promise. This doesn’t serve the truly creative person who might really have a problem or be stuck and instead panders to the wannabes. Those people who will never actually follow through.

So how is The War of Art different? Well, first of all, the book is divided into three sections. The chapters in each section are about a page long. It’s all very concise. I could pick it up and put it down quickly. I can see myself opening it in a panic for a quick slap to the face without having to lose more time to it than is absolutely necessary. A shot in the arm should be quick and painful. The War of Art provides just that.

The text itself is not flowery. Pressfield gets to the point. It’s as though he knows that he only has a few moments to get something across to the reader and push her out the door and onto the next phase of her creative existence. I greatly appreciate this. I don’t need a history of something and a dozen case studies of artists I have never heard of. I want someone to talk to me about me and what I’m experiencing to get the process moving again. My time is valuable and the author understands.

Finally, my favorite thing about this book is the simple fact that everything in there is something that I already knew but that Pressfield took the time to put down on paper for me. I know that the only way to get something done is to do it. I know that fame and fortune are the worst motivation to take on any creative endeavor. I know that resistance lurks around every corner and that it is so much easier to make an excuse than it is to do something. I know all of this! But sitting down and reading it in the chunks he has broken these simple facts down into makes it infinitely more potent and pulls all of my attention to the real problem at hand.

I’m a person who has a seasonal creative block. I would like to think that the occasional innoculation from this book will keep that away or at least minimize the damage. If you’re the kind of person who needs kid gloves and coddling, this book is not for you. If you think you’re the kind of person who needs that coddling, you’re probably not. Life’s tough, wear a helmet. And read this book.

I don’t participate in revenue generating links. Feel free to click and know in your heart that I won’t get paid.

10 days project #1 – complete

Posted by on August 1, 2009 No comments

I started the Ten Days Project with the hope that the creative block that settles in with the long days and powerful heat of summer could somehow be beaten back and there could be at least a shred of hope that some work, any work could be done before the shadows of late September set in. The idea itself came up in an early morning fog and to be fair, I can’t say that it’s inspiration and execution was anything other than desperate. It wasn’t complicated and there wasn’t any theory or grand list of arcane resources that spawned it.

The fact is that for me, creating music is light on physical reminders. It is with an enormous sense of envy that I have watched painters and sculptors amass piles of materials and stare at them for hours and hours. Yes, with an instrument there is always the reminder, but there are too many things one can do with a guitar. Practicing and improvisation are great, but they don’t necessarily facilitate composing. So I thought about trying to bring a reminder, a talisman, into my daily routine. I bought a three pack of notebooks and started scribbling. The intent was to keep it at hand so that every now and again I would be reminded of the project. The composition would occupy a space in my peripheral vision at all times.

Part of the project was to set a deadline. Having a point in time set at the point when I began the process gave me many things. With a set number of days limits can be imposed almost instantly. There is only so much that can be done and that provides boundaries, something that we too often lack. For the past year, I have been trying to produce a piece of work every week. I had a recording available most Thursdays and that was a pretty good way to do things with sketches. But a full blown piece needs at least 10 days for complete maturity, in my humble opinion. Setting it at 10 days also made it harder to pin it down in my mind. It was a simple trick: if I couldn’t readily assign a day of the week to the deadline, it was harder to procrastinate or skip a day of work.

I decided early on that I wanted to return to Pure Data and some of my roots as a composer of Art Music. That’s my code for “it doesn’t have a beat and you probably can’t bop along to it in the car.” I wanted to do something atmospheric. Turning away from linear time environments like Logic made it easier for me to think in terms of clouds of sounds and textures rather than clock time and measures. I also made the decision to work with real time loop manipulation because I find that entertaining. It provides lots of fodder for improvisation and resists scores. Especially if the sounds being looped are used as textures rather than lines. With that general concept in mind, I took two sound files that I had recorded with my iPhone as a sort of test to see how well it would work with field recordings and used them. They were not edited in any way. I simply loaded them and began to manipulate them.

In all, there were two sound files used but I used one of them twice. That is to say, I loaded three arrays with two sounds. Each array was given three delay lines. That makes nine streams of sound. The length of each delay was set individually and the dynamics of each stream was manipulated independently as well. I used a simple midi fader box to handle these tasks. I also used the midi controller to set the start and end points of the loops. All of these parameters were manipulated in real time.

The streams were positioned on a stereo plane and over the course of seven minutes their positions gradually shifted. This was the only part of the composition that was planned. And by planned I don’t mean to say that I sat down and decided that this tap would be moving from this position to that position on the stereo horizon. I simply decided that this is how the stream would move without any plan to what would be playing at that time. At the time of the recording I had no idea where things were moving in advance. All decisions were made during my recording session.

There was no score for this piece. I thought about making one, but 10 days isn’t a long time. It was enough time for me to build the patch that would do all of the nit picky things like recording the output, etc. That said, in thinking about the patch as an instrument, it made producing certain sounds easier and thus more likely. I suspect that if I had had enough time to really learn the instrument, I could have done far more interesting things with it. But I believe that my inability to devote that kind of time to the in depth study of the patch is more of a positive factor than a detractor.

None of this text or explanation is by any means for you, the reader. It’s blind groping and hope on my part. By all means, take a listen and let me know what you think.

Ten Days Project #1

Creative Commons License
Ten Days Project #1 by j.c. wilson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at othertime.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://othertime.com.