P-rate

Puppet Show and Duet

It's warming up and I'm finally able to wake up early to get more quality writing done. I've recently been commissioned to write some music for a Puppet Show based here in Nagoya, it's a cute little show for kids based on the story of the "Three Billy Goats Gruff". We are also talking about a feature length show with a string quartet based on "The Little Mermaid" for adults- we'll see how that goes...


I'm also working on another guitar duet based on the past lives I've supposedly lived. Each movement is based on one life. So far, I've heard of about 4 past lives. They are each interesting in their own right.

The first movement of the piece is based on life as a venetian merchant with a taste for fine wine and spices. It's highly ornamented and in it I want to portray our man gliding down the canals of Venice triumphantly with his treasures secured safely in the boat.

The second movement of the piece is based on life as a buddhist nun living in the mountains of northern Japan in the late 1800's. She had lived a hard life and finally decided to become a nun as most women who had hard lives and no other place to go often did. Near the end of her life she began to dream about being reborn as a man in a place as far away as possible from Japan. In this movement I want to capture the image of her on high ragged cliffs looking off into the vast and desolate ocean.

The third movement is based on life as a native-conflict-resolution-specialist or peace-Man if you will. This movment is very rhythmic, in it I want to depict a sort of imagined ritualistic dance based loosely on Native American-esque rhythms.

The possible intermezzo movement is based on life as a WW2-era artist who loses all of his co-conspirators in art to the war. In this movement I thought I would write a sort of modernist/serialist experimental piece.

In the final movement I wanted to write as if a I were a rocker writing classical music. David Byrne wrote a quartet called "High Life for Nine Instruments." It's a lot of fun and very repetitive in a very rocker writing classical music way. Also the soundtrack for "There Will be Blood" was written by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead it also has the same sort of rocker characteristics and also a rawness that's immediate and accesible. It's a subtle difference but I'd like to try it. I often think about Kurt Cobain's comment that all he was trying to do was imitate a Pixies song- maybe that's what we're all trying to do.

October Dream-Jason Taylor Quartet in Osaka

You should fast forward through the preliminaries to get to the good stuff;)

October Dream

The Osaka Guitar Quartet performing my piece "October Dream." I have a video of myself performing this piece when I had long hair- I'll post it if I can find it.

Choco-natto(or dried fermented soybeans covered in milk chocolate)

Dried fermented soybeans covered in chocolate.

Lyrics?!! Crying seafowl?

You stand in the line just to hit a new low
You're faking a smile with the coffee you go
You tell me your life's been way off line
You're falling to pieces every time
And I don't need no carryin' on

Because you had a bad day
You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know
You tell me don't lie
You work at a smile and you go for a ride
You had a bad day
The camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day
You had a bad day

Is there anything more painful than mediocre lyrics? I just finished writing two pieces for piano and two sopranos. I wrote the words to one of the songs and the other is based on a haiku by Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. The jury still isn't in on my lyrics but the Basho poem has wonderful imagery of a fish's eyes filled with tears.
Vocal music can be so difficult because of those pesky little words and their pesky meanings. I often start out wanting to write a certain kind of piece and then find a poem I love to set to music only to realize that the poem dictates a certain type of music different from the music I wanted to write. On top of that, even if I wanted to use a modern text say something written in the past 75 years then I'd have to get copyright permission. So then I think maybe I should just write a vocalise(a song without words) but that sort of defeats the purpose. There's also the problem that most poetry stands just fine on its own- it really doesn't need any music muddying it up. I love Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas' poetry but I could never set them to music- they're work is just so perfect as it is. So, I decided to write a short text and repeat it over and over out of context so that the meaning of the words become secondary and subservient to the whole. Haikus work brilliantly as they are so open to interpretation.
Oh and here's a little bit of trivia about Basho- he was supposedly a ninja in diguise as a travelling poet- take that in your pipe and smoke it!

Yatter-man

Luka saw his first movie over the weekend "Yatter-man"