3/29

I'm exceptionally busy this week.

Tomorrow, after all of my classes, I have a dress rehearsal for African Ensemble, which I have to leave early to get to sound check for my Jazz Singers concert at the Syndicate. Then, Thursday, I have a make-up lesson at 5:30, immediately followed by African warm-up and concert. Friday I shouldn't be too busy, except for a Snarky Puppy show (yesssss). But then Saturday it picks back up, and I have something with African all day, and then there's a dress rehearsal for my classical ensemble on Sunday night.

If you're interested, here's a schedule of all of the stuff I'm playing at in the near future:

Tomorrow! 3/30 - Jazz Singers II at the Syndicate - 9pm, 5 bucks.

3/31 - African Cultural Festival Preview, I think that one's at 8 in Voertman Hall.

4/1 - Snarky Puppy (April Fool's, not playing in that one.)

4/2 - African Cultural Festival... I'll get back to you.

4/6 - Senor Fin at Hailey's - 9pm, I think there's a cover, but it's probably not too expensive. We're playing first.

4/8 - Singers II Concert at Kenton Hall at 6.

4/12 - Night of Percussion, 7pm?

4/21 - Global Rhythms (African Ensemble and Gamelan)

Denton Arts and Jazz Festival is the last weekend of April, and Singers and African are in that one (I think), but that's also the same weekend as a BK camp, so I can't decide where I should be.

I'm going to Big Mike's to put up some videos, and then they'll be up here for everyone to see.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

M

3/25 - Miles Okazaki... and stuff

It's been a pretty good week around here.

First of all, I saw the GDYO Wind Symphony with UNT's Symphonic Band today. It was really good. I didn't get to see much of Symphonic Band, but I always enjoy them, and the piece I heard was pretty spectacular. And the GDYO Wind Symphony did a very good job.

I had to leave early so I could get a little cash and go to Dan's Silverleaf to Miles Okazaki play with Colin Hinton and Mike Luzecky.



Miles is a guitarist, kanjira player, and composer who's really influenced by South Indian music. Oh, and he's studied at Harvard, Julliard, and the MSM, not only for music, but to study literature, mathematics, and visual arts. He's a an all-around boss.

He taught Advanced South Indian on Wednesday and explained how a couple of his songs work before I heard them today. He really likes to play with the shapes of rhythms, and he told us how to create rhythmic dissonance, and how it takes much longer to resolve but creates an even more powerful effect.

Take this beat for example, which is in 6/4: (o=bass, x=snare)
 |      |-|  |      |      |- |     |-
o    o o x    o    o x    x

Miles took a beat off of the beginning 5 times, to create a bar of 6, a bar of 5, a bar of 4, a bar of 3, and a bar of 2; then he added them back on, a bar of 3, a bar of 4, a bar of 5.

 |      |-|  |      |      |- |     |-

o    o o x    o     o x    x

  |-|   |      |      |- |     |-

 o o x     o    o x    x

 |      |      |- |     |-

x     o     o x    x

 |      |- |     |-

o     o x    x

 |- |     |-

o x    x

 |      |- |     |-

o     o x    x

 |      |      |- |     |-

x     o     o x    x

  |-|  |      |      |- |     |-

 o o x    o    o x    x

This makes 6 + 5(2) + 4(2) + 3(2) + 2 = 32 beats, or 8 bars of a nice 4/4 groove.

So, that's what the drummer plays. If the bass player can play it inverted, starting on the 2/4 bar, this makes some pretty heavy rhythmic tension, but it always resolves in the same place. I think it's really neat.

I have a pretty busy weekend, but certainly a fun one. Mahler tomorrow, and one (possibly two?) Senor Fin shows. I'll let you know where those are.

M

3/21

It's my brother's birthday today. Happy birthday, Max.

I'm at a coffeehouse, taking advantage of speedy wifi and the opportunity to get out of my room. I have two more videos to put up, which will probably be on here soon.





I would just like to take this space to talk about Stravinsky and his Ballets Russes.

Well, they're not really his. But he's who really made them famous in the music world.

Just after the turn of the century, Igor Stravinsky teamed up with some of his Russian friends and wrote 3 ballets in Paris. His first was The Firebird, which I don't really know much about, but if you've ever heard it, it's a lot more conservative than anything he writes later on.

His second was Petrouchka, a tragedy and a comedy about a puppet who falls in love with another puppet, a ballerina, but then he gets into some big mess and a moor kills him. This all happens because a magician brings them to life at a carnival or something in Russia, and all of the people are sad that Petrouchka dies, and the magician tries to remind them that it was just a puppet, but they all make him look like a fool, and, to make matters worse, he's cursed by Petrouchka's ghost at the end.

Here's the first segment of a really good rendition:



The music for Petrouchka was written at the same time Stravinsky was exploring polytonality, and, supposedly (I haven't looked at the score yet), everything is in either C or F#, or sometimes both, which can make for some interesting and ugly sounds. This was a big step for Stravinsky considering how normal The Firebird was, but it seems like nothing compared to what his last ballet was.

Stravinsky's last ballet was the Rite of Spring, and it was pretty wacky. The setting was pagan, traditional Russia, and the whole story is about the sacrifice of a young girl. The dancing is almost the opposite of traditional ballet, and the music is basically the opposite of what was traditional orchestral music at the time.

And here's one for Rite of Spring:



This whole scene, with ludicrous dancing and absurd music made the Parisians either really angry or really excited. Some people at the premiere started booing and throwing things during the performance, while others yelled at the angry people to shut up so they could watch history be made. Camille Saint-Saens, a notable French composer, walked out after the opening bassoon solo. Supposedly all of the yelling was too loud to hear the music, and Nijinksy, the choreographer, yelled out numbers to the dancers so they had something to reference. There was a riot, and I wish I could have seen it.

Sometimes I play this as background music. Well, I did, before I watched this. Now it's kinda weird.

This music has all sorts of weird rhythms, and ridiculous instrumentation (2 timpanists with 5 drums each, alto flute, piccolo and bass trumpet, Wagner tubas, 2 bass clarinets), and was probably really hard for the dancers to follow. But it sounds really cool.

I'm going to bed early. I have a Texas Government test in the morning, and I would like to pass.

M

3/20 - New videos.

So I have some new videos.

I tried to upload the stuff from lecture series from the past month while I was home, but the internet here is a little less reliable than I remembered it, and I only got to upload two. But here they are:





Maybe the internet will be faster back in Denton, so videos don't take 14 hours to load.

I'm going back today, leaving after I finish typing and flying from here to Amarillo, and from Amarillo to Dallas. Should be a blast.

M

3/14 - BK March

Hey everyone. I hope you ate some pie today.

Musically, I've taken a break for a while except for Blue Knights camp. Before that, I was pretty musicked out, and after that I was tired in general.

But, you should know about what we did.

I drove from Amarillo on Friday night, so I made it to camp Saturday morning. I sight-read some cool new music, and we cleaned all day on Saturday, and put it together on Sunday.

I would tell you cool things about this show, but it's really something you have to see. If you can come see us before tour, that would be cool, but you should definitely come see the show in your hometown when we come. We're traveling some ridiculous distance like 13,000 miles, so we should have you covered.

Oh, most of the pit plays Scottish Tenors at some point in the show. We haven't done it yet, but it's going to be awesome.

Someone was a genius and recorded our run-through at Show and Tell this weekend. I didn't do as well as I could have, but this is a taste of what's to come:







I'll be back after break, or possibly even sooner.

3/9

What are you giving up for Ash Wednesday?

I went to church today, even though I don't usually go to church. I like Ash Wednesday. You don't have to be a Christian to be able to appreciate the power of letting yourself go and really trying hard to kick a bad habit, or to start a new one.

I realized today that there are a lot of ways that you could do wrong to someone, whether that's explicitly hurting them, or forgetting to do something, or not telling them something they should know or doing something for them that should be done for them. I'm giving up doing wrong for Ash Wednesday, which is a pretty impossible task, and even though I'm not expecting to be perfect, I'm certainly not going to give anything but my all.

I sometimes have to remind myself that just because I'm not happy, I shouldn't take away others' happiness. I should never do that ever, under any circumstances. That might actually be the definition of sin.

M

3/7

As of today, I have decided that I won't force myself to write here daily. I used to make myself put something up here everyday, but I've come up with a few good reasons to stop that.

First of all, I don't really have the time to do this every day anymore. This week I have to write out clarinet and piano parts by hand, which has already taken a solid four hours out of today and yesterday, and I'm only two or three pages in. On top of that, I have other composition homework, and studying for aural skills, and theory homework, and after all of that mess, I have to study for my lessons and barrier stuff.

Holy crap, I haven't played any of my barrier stuff yet.

I've been a big disappointment in my lesson the past couple of weeks, and I'd hate to make that a habit. Not to mention all of the work I have to do on that silly percussion ensemble piece, which will probably keep me from sleeping at least once this week.

Second of all, and I know this sounds pretty bad at a music school, but some days I don't really learn anything. Some days in my classes we ask questions we have about projects, or run over material we've already worked on, or take tests; heck, some days I don't even learn anything new in my lectures. Today was one of those days.

Today I took half of my aural skills midterm, practiced for an hour, ran through stuff in my ensembles, didn't do very well in my lesson, ate lunch at 3 and started on my homework that I put off over the weekend, and ate dinner with some birthday money at Mr. Chopsticks.

That was probably the last time you'll be hearing about my day, which brings me to number three:

As much as I wanted this blog to be strictly for musical purposes, I've realized that I created this blog as a   way of communication to the people I care about. Even though I'm not really a talkative person, I still care about people, and I'm pretty sure at least my parents care about me. So I wrote on here in hopes that I could talk to my parents and keep from getting homesick without calling them all the time.

But I'm done with that. I have people I can talk to if I want to talk about how my day went, and this should definitely be a place for interesting musical facts instead of chatter about the details of my day to day life. I would feel less bad about taking people's time if they were reading things that could actually be useful, instead of keeping people from living their lives by taking the time to read about mine.

There is a lot of filler and junk to sift through on the internet, but I promise you, from now on, that you want have to sift through anything I publish to find something awesome.

M

3/4-5

Hey everyone.

Today I had a good Aural Skills class, and learned in composition that I have to write something in a week a perform it next Friday. Hm...

Singers was good, and after that there was a very lengthy but very entertaining master class by So Percussion, in which they had some chamber groups play without their music even though it wasn't memorized, and play wrong on purpose together just to achieve a better sense of ensemble awareness. There was also some singing of parts as an example of how to practice without instruments, and some general life lessons. Oh, and one of them has a blog:

goingindifferentdirections.blogspot.com

I'm meeting all sorts of cool people with blogs this week.

After that I caught up on the Daily Show and headed over to the Music Annex to pack up the drums for African Ensemble. We played a short little concert tonight, 15 minutes, at a private school (I think?) just east of Denton. They were doing a series of little presentations on the world, and each little class picked a country, and all of the kids from Pre-k 3 (isn't that pretty young?) to 5th grade had a little skit. We were the grand finale, and I thought we sounded pretty nice. A lot of us showed up, which is pretty unusual.

We got home after the concert and their dinner, and I relaxed for a little bit before biking down to Hailey's off the square to go see SNARKY PUPPY ahhhhhhhhh. I got there at like 9:40, expecting to be fashionably late, since the doors opened at 9, but I don't think anyone started playing until at least 10:30, and they had a guest vocalist come sing with them as an opener, so they didn't truly kick off until about 11:30. But when they did finally get around to it, they blew a lot of minds, melted a lot of faces, and rocked very hard. They played all of their funkiest material, and had some extended solo breaks and slow jams just to please the crowd. The drummer was fantastic, but then they brought on some 16 year old kid from Booker T. Washington School for the Arts, and he was literally unbelievable. Some of his ideas coming through the drums would have probably never in my lifetime come from my own head, and at times it seemed like he was outplaying the actual drummer. I was really impressed, with the whole thing, and I danced like a white fool right in front of the stage and I had a blast. I got a t-shirt. I'm really glad they're coming back in April.

It's been a really good Friday and the beginning of a really good Saturday, and I'm excited.

M

3/3 - So Percussion

A post with a title?!

Sorry. Today I drummed in the beginner's ethnomusicology class with African Ensemble, and it was probably the best we've ever sounded. Probably because we didn't have to drive to SE Dallas.

I also finally got around to looking at John Corigliano's First Symphony, and it uses a lot of interesting compositional ideas that were pretty new to me. He uses very wide vibrato in the strings to create a wall of sound that isn't necessarily one pitch, but a mass of tones ranging from a low point to a high point. He also used a lot of quarter-tones, and had musicians play rhythms at random. At one point in the first movement, the piece builds up a lot of speed and intensity, but as it slows back down, it keeps the same intensity until it can't sustain itself any longer and collapses. He inserts a piece that reminds him of one of his friends, and inserts other themes that serve as nods to other people. There's also a pretty rockin' contrabassoon solo, if I'm not mistaking this for something else I've listened to in the past few days. I've heard a lot of stuff though, so I might be wrong.

But, the most important thing I did today was attend the So Percussion concert.

So Percussion is a percussion quartet. They're one of the most well-known and successful percussion ensembles around today, and they've not only toured all over the world, but have produced at least 3 records and have collaborated with Steve Reich, Paul Lansky and some other big name composers to write percussion quartet literature.

Tonight, they played three pieces that were originally written for them, or at least co-commissioned. They started with Steve Reich's "Mallet Quartet," commissioned by So Percussion, Amadinda Quartet of Budapest, Hungary, Nexus of Toronto, Synergy from Australia, and Soundstreams in Canada. Though it has three movements, fast, slow, and fast, it all kind of blurs together into an ambient... well, I don't really know. It's hard to describe. It was really good, but that doesn't do it justice.

The second piece, "It Is Time (for 4 percussionists)" by Steven Mackey, featured each of the members on what they enjoyed the most, so part was a steel drum feature, part was a drumset feature, a marimba feature, and an everything else feature. Seriously. Over the course of 40 minutes they used a china on a hi hat stand, metronome hooked up to delay pedals, glass bottles, a Newton's cradle, a mouth organ, a musical saw, wind-up toys, pump organ, flexatones, microtonal steel drum, and a dozen egg timers set to go off at certain parts of the piece. When the program said the piece would be 40 minutes, I kind of groaned a little bit, but I shouldn't have. This piece found a way to always be interesting and entertaining.

After an intermission, the finished the show with "neither Anvil nor Pulley" by Dan Trueman, another composed with So Percussion. The piece explores the relationship between man and machine through consistent use of laptops and metronomes and interesting playback devices. It incorporated a record turntable somehow, and had a whole movement based on messing around with metronomes set at 120 bpm (but these musicians do a lot more than just stop and start it). The fourth movement features a bass drum with a speaker fixed onto its head, and handheld mics connected to the speaker, so whatever the mics pick up run into the speaker, which is feeding sound into the mics, so it creates mind (and ear) blowing feedback; the highlight of the movement is when they get the bass drum to "sing" in overtones the chords of Bach's first prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier, which involved constantly retuning the bass drum and repositioning the mics. My only complaint is that parts of it seemed to carry on forever, but otherwise there were a lot of good ideas and interesting concepts, and it all fit together pretty well.

I need to finish my comp homework.

The point is, they were really really good, and I'm glad they're around tonight and tomorrow to teach us their ways. They're playing in deparmental tomorrow, by the way; I'll have to bring my little video recorder.

Have a good Friday,

M

3/2

So yesterday I stayed up until 6 doing all of my homework. I went to bed and slept for 4 hours, and woke up in time to turn my project in and start my day a little later than expected.

But late start aside, I've had a really good day. My composition project looked fancy, and I got an 87 on the previous project. Singers was fun and I wasn't too behind in Percussion Group, which was unusual. I had a test in Aural Skills that I did pretty well in, and African was pretty fun. Then I came home and watched some Hulu stuff and relaxed and made up for sleep I lost.

Today in composition we talked about microtonality, and how 20th century composers got sick of sticking to 12 notes in a scale and split each interval into lots of pieces. A half step, or a semi-tone, can be split in half to create a quarter tone, and has even been split enough to make a sixteenth tone, or 8 notes in between a C and a C sharp.

We spent a lot of time today discussing Harry Partch, a 20th century composer who went off into his own little world and changed the way some people look at not only music but sound and communication in general.

Mr. Partch started just like the rest of us, using a 12 tone scale, but I guess he decided one day that he was sick of it, so he burned all of the music he wrote using that method and adopted a 43 note scale which is more suited to natural speech inflections. He designed his own instruments that use this scale, and they have cool names like the Boo, the Spoils of War, the Chromelodeon, and the Marimba Eroica. He described himself as a "philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry," because his thoughts and ideas about how music should be played led him to make his own instruments to accommodate these ideas.

During the Great Depression he lived as a hobo and traveled the country doing little jobs wherever he ended up. He wrote about his adventures in "Bitter Music," and this is probably an influence on his work "Barstow." The piece's text is based on things he found written on a makeshift hobo message board outside a station in Barstow, California, which he probably visited as a hobo himself.

"Barstow" was originally written for "intoning voice," or voice "singing" or inflecting on his 43 note scale, and adapted guitar, which had a longer neck and more frets to play all of the notes in his scale. But over the years, his collection of functional 43 note instruments grew, and he modified the piece several times to add new instruments and voices. One of his later versions calls for three vocalists, surrogate kithara, chromelodeon I, diamond marimba and boo, and each of these instruments uses a different notation system, which makes the score almost illegible to anyone who doesn't understand his music.

I just thought he was a very interesting character, and he was something I could write about and make into an interesting little blurb. Another composer, Julian Carrillo, used numbers to designate a tone, from 0=C to 96=C an octave above, with 96 intervals in between, or 8 per chromatic note. So his music would read: 88 92 88 84 80 84 88 92 88 84 80 etc., and would really be a hassle to understand and read quickly.

So I wrote about Mr. Partch instead.

Hopefully I won't be staying up all night again tonight, but it wasn't so bad last night.

M

3/1

Happy March everyone!

I dig March.

This blog is going to be short, because I'm in the middle of homework, and it is getting pretty late.

Today I actively participated in Theory, and had another good lesson with Christopher Deane. We discussed rolls for the majority of the time, and why you roll with your hands apart as opposed to keeping them in like a regular stroke (because you get less articulation near the edge, and you don't have to move your arms back and forth if you just move your hands apart), and why we measure the roll and how important it is to focus on the attack, the sustain AND the release. There's a whole lot to think about in this game.

After that I went to lecture, and the guest today was Darcy James Argue. He's a composer, mostly for his big band, but he was initially an indie rock/small group jazz guy, and he stuck his foot in the metaphorical water after Bob Brookmeyer told him he should study with him and write more big band stuff. After he got his bachelor's at McGill in Montreal, he got Master's at the New England Conservatory, and after that he commuted from Boston to New York every Tuesday on a ten dollar round trip Chinatown bus, that supposedly frequently had engine explosions and accidents, but was really cheap and convenient.

Eventually he got together a group of people that just liked to read new charts and play music, even if they weren't getting paid, and he formed his band. The band just put out an album on a mainly classical label, but after some research they knew that it was their best option because this label would give them 80% of sales, and only license their record for 4 years instead of keeping it forever. Most labels only give 10-12% of sales, supposedly. That's frightening.

Part of how he got his name out in the world was by blogging, mostly about the shows that he went to go see. People found him because of his reviews, and spread the word around, and since they read his blog once, they knew his name and went to his show. It was kind of inspirational to me, for this.

I also liked the attitude he claims New Yorkers have. When he put his band together, he flat out told them that they wouldn't be getting paid a dime, but some people still showed up; even if they weren't getting anything financially, they were becoming better musicians, and getting their name around town and having a good time. I like that attitude, and I wish I could think like that more often. It would be useful during two and a half hour church services.

After the lecture I had Senor Fin rehearsal, and after that I should have gone to Gamelan, but I had to do my composition project, so I did about half of that before practicing my Percussion Group material for two hours, and hopefully I'll do a little better tomorrow than in previous rehearsals.

But, alas, it's 11:15 and I still have comp stuff to do, and some aural skills, and more comp stuff to do, and maybe I'll finish before the sun rises and I have a big Wednesday.

I guess that's college?

In these situations, I remind myself how fortunate I am to be studying something I enjoy, and how lucky I am that I wasn't forced to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer by my parents. Because if I were staying up all night over physics homework, or an anatomy paper or studying for a silly law test. I would be miserable.

M