Imagination

I just wanted to plug the wonderful composer Bruce Adolphe's book The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination. It's such a great book for training your inner artist. He takes some of the concepts that are taught at the Juilliard Acting School and then expands them and applies them to music. The book has really helped me to clarify my ideas.

Guerilla Tactics

I was really impressed with Mayke Nas's piece No reason to panic (2006) not only is the piece a great listen, it's also a great staging idea! Here's the general idea

Unannounced to the audience, No reason to panic served as a surprising entr'acte during a stage changeover in which the strings of the orchestra had to make way for the grand piano, that slowly rose from the catacombs.

Here' a review

"And suddenly this fresh music sounded, right through the hoisting of the grand piano. Flutes that played their ascending lines in different time-divisions, sometimes together with a piccolo. Pulsating double basses. Percussion, that was enlarged with a lion's roar, a howling drum. The conversations died down, the audience feasted upon this spicy intermediate course. The explanation came during the break. The composition turned out to be a commissioned new piece by Mayke Nas (1972) with the fitting title No reason to panic."
(Bela Luttmer in Volkskrant, 7 oktober 2006)

How cool is that! And what a great idea for new composers as a way to get their music performed by orchestras and heard by new audiences! I really believe that these guerilla tactics might be the way to go. It reminds me of those little outtake gems(outros) that you used to find between the Beatle's songs especially on the Stawberry Fields Forever album which Michael Gordon of Bang on a Can used as the basis of his piece "I Buried Paul."
The outro starts at around 3:30


Also this is completely unrelated but I think I just found one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs I've ever heard it's called Twice as Pretty I don't know who the artist is but it's just so moving and the lyrics are so well written.
Enough rambling from me...

Hot music for cold days

Let's see... I spent most of my Winter Holiday listening to African music, especially Jeli Moussa Sissoko's Kora playing and Moroccan gnawa music- Hassan Hakmoun's The Fire Within: Gnawa Music of Morocco and Mustapha Baqbou's album Djema El Fna- great stuff. I've been trying to capture the rhythmic flavor and playfulness of this wonderful music in a new solo guitar piece called "Falling Through the Cracks" I've also made some good progress on my orchestral piece- a piece that keeps getting put on the back burner. It seems to be one of those pieces I need to write through- like a sort of phase- and once I get through it I can finally climb out on the other side.

We did the traditional Japanese New Year's celebration eating osechi ryori(Japanese New Year's food) and going to the shrine for hatsumode(the first prayer of the new year)- it was pretty relaxing. I don't remember much of the shrine- had a little too much sake. One of my resolutions for this year is to communicate more to people in person- I feel like I spend too much time on e-mail and not enough talking to people in person.


Here's a little something I found of Hassan's on youtube

Texas Pic

Summer 2007 Houston, Texas

Uncertainty

Anton Zeilinger, an Viennese physicist who has successfully beamed(read transported!!!) the properties of one quantum particle to another was interviewed in a 2006 sight and sound issue had this to say about quantum uncertainty

Take a particle with an uncertain location and an uncertain velocity. When you look at it through a microscope and locate it, the particle gives you an answer: "Here I am." That means, the location becomes reality at that moment. Beforehand, the particle had no location at all. With the choice of the measuring equipment we've had a major impact on reality. But the answer that nature gives is completely random...I call that the two freedoms: first the freedom of the experimenter in choosing the measuring equipment - that depends on my freedom of will; and then the freedom of nature in giving me the answer it pleases.

I've heard this idea before, but haven't yet heard it explained so clearly. I often wonder if this then applies to the rest of nature. If so, it it similiar to the Buddhist idea of Maya(or many other religions for that matter) in which all we see in this world is an illusion. I think it might be a great idea for a new piece.

Cold Night Into Dawn- I wrote the music to these

Click on the links to view the clips. I wrote the music in fulfillment of the Music for the Media Course
Opening Scene 1
Opening Scene 2
Opening Scene 3
Bomber Backstory
Nuclear Bomb Making
Cold Night Into Dawn-Final Sequence Part I
Cold Night Into Dawn-Final Sequence PartII

Getting Here in Paris, Portugal!

The Uno Guitar Duowill perform "Getting Here" at the following locations this upcoming month.
2007/11/2 20:30 L’Archipel Paris
2007/11/9 20:00 Teatro Sa da Bandeira Portugal

In other news I bought roasted chestnuts on Sunday with Mari and Luka and the clerk gave Luka his own little bag of chestnuts. After he ate each chestnut he did a special chestnut dance which involved some head-bobbing and running around his mom. It was quite complex, but expertly executed.