1/24 - Hm.

It's been a long day.

Don't think that it's been a bad day, though. It hasn't been.

Aural Skills was good. I finished my speed writing.

Composition was pretty weird. Mondays are departmental days in Composition, and they had a guest today, William Bolcom. He's written a lot of cool stuff, and he was Composer of the Year in 2007, you should go to his website: williambolcom.com

He spent the majority of his 50 minutes on a setting of a Lord Byron poem, "Prometheus," which I just discovered was a piece that he wrote. It took me ages to find anything on it, and I still can't find the music to show you.

Here's the poem: Prometheus

Basically, Prometheus gave humans fire, and the gods punished (and are still punishing) him by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle disembowel him every day. Yeah, like he's reboweled overnight and then goes through it all again every day. Poor guy.

The piece is for piano, chorus, and orchestra, and begins with atonal piano. The chorus eerily makes its way through the first stanza using "sprechstimme". The second stanza slowly, carefully becomes tonal and by the third stanza, has reached something similar to D major. But, like the poem, it falls back into atonality as it moves closer to the end of the poem, as death could be Prometheus' only victory, which is a pretty morbid scene in itself.

Sprechstimme is between singing and speaking. Some composers give intervals to sing but don't give a starting note, and others just give directions to go. It sounds pretty weird when it's just one person, but really weird when it's a whole bunch of people, not singing the same frequency. It sounds like a ghost chorus.



I know that was one person, but, eh, still weird.

Anyways, I thought that was cool, even though it was weird. He did a really good job portraying Prometheus' unjust misery, and he was a pretty brilliant dude.

I'm the only baritone in Singers, which is fun because I'm usually the only one singing my part, and I love challenges.

Jayce handed out music in Percussion Group today; I got a cool percussion part and a tricky mallet part. We'll see how it goes.

African was alright. We reviewed the stuff we did on Wednesday and Friday, because we had some new people, but once they were caught up we learned all of the parts to Tokoe, which is 4 bell parts, shaker stuff, and at least 2 drums. I got CDs from Gideon of all of the grooves, and I'm excited to learn them all.

After African I jammed with Jesse, and then the two of us and another Jesse took my bike to the shop. My bike has a bent frame, bent pedal, broken front brake and bent seat, at least, and they said it would probably be less of a hassle and less expensive to just get another bike. Bummer.

I went to the library to get new CDs from a list of things I need to get, which I've compiled from a book I got for Christmas one year. It's a grab bag; today I got Pet Sounds, a Beastie Boys CD, Sidney Bechet (soprano sax jazz), and Waldemar Bastos' "Pretaluz," which is Afro-beat I think. I haven't listened to it yet.

It's been a good day, but kind of a downer every once in a while. Hard music to learn, late lunch, no bike, weird food, no mail.

But my reasons to complain would be overwhelmed by my reasons to be happy, so I'll keep thinking positive.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll have homemade, organic video of Marvin Stamm playing here at UNT, and maybe some Gamelan stuff. It'll be a good day.

M