My piece performed, and other things on my mind

This past week has been amazing!  Last week I scheduled three rehearsals with some awesome performers for a performance of my brass quintet (with added bass drum), and they performed very well at the Oregon Composers Forum (OCF) concert last Saturday night! 
Here is the recording from Saturday night:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/53528622/05%20Track%2005.wav
The next day I was able to repeat the same performance (but without the bass drum) in front of a bunch of brass players at a Monday night class called Brass Class.  I normally don't attend Brass Class because I actually have an Eastern European Folk Ensemble rehearsal during that time, but I took an absence in EEFE so that I could have my piece performed again.

In rehearsing with performers I always learn something very wonderful:  that I absolutely love performers (or at least ones as awesome as here)!  They enjoy playing new music and are really nice with the composer, and being able to guide the rehearsals is wonderful because it gives you a chance to really befriend these people!  Meeting performers that like playing your music has to be one of my favorite parts of being a composer.


Now for something else that's been on my mind that I want to get out.  Sometimes I feel a little lonely and wish I had a female companion to spend time with.  That feeling has been growing gradually for the past couple of years, and lately it's really been on my mind a lot.  I often think about the people I'm interested in, and try to determine who I would want to ask out, but honestly I really just don't know as many female friends as I should, or the ones that I have asked out simply were not interested back.  I've decided to start asking girls that I don't know very well out for tea or coffee so that we may get to know each other a little better, and that way I can really open my options and consider more people.  There are still certain people I know who I definitely am interested in, but am too nervous to say anything to them simply because when I see them I get the feeling that they are not interested, even before anything is ever said.  If there is a girl out there who is interested in me, I just wish they would at least hint me so that I can stop looking in the wrong directions.  I'm honestly getting tired of always being alone, even though I have always been more of a "lone wolf" and have gotten very accustomed to it.


Now for some positive news!  While searching some more (at the request of my composition professor) for the right short film to use for my film scoring demo, I found what I think is the most perfect video I could possibly have found on the internet!  It is called Lutins, and here it is:

http://vimeo.com/21548329 (you'll have to click the link because the video will not embed)

My professor Rob Kyr will see the video tomorrow, among two other videos, and we'll know if it's the one to use!  I'm very excited!

All in all, everything has been wonderful!

Short films

School has been going well - I'm really excited for Rob Kyr (my comp professor) to take a look at the videos I've found for possible film scoring projects - he's going to help me decide on the right video!  So far, this is the video I'm wanting to do the most:

I originally wanted to score for a 3D animated film about a girl who raises a baby dragon, but while the dragon is still a baby it gets taken away by an older dragon; then after years of searching for the dragon's lair, the girl slays an older dragon, but then realizes that the dragon was her old dragon grown up.  It was a very long video though (17 minutes), so that wouldn't be ideal for a film scoring demo.  The above video is short enough, and plenty of things happen, enabling different kinds of music!  I think Rob Kyr will like this one, but I still have to find more videos by tomorrow morning for him to look through.

Thoughts on a Sunday night

Today was a wonderful day!  After staying up way too late last night (4:00am) playing Final Fantasy IX, I didn't expect today to be a very comfortable day, considering I only had about five hours of sleep.  Surprisingly though, I haven't enjoyed a weekend as much as this one in a while (aside from the film scoring session a couple weeks ago of course)!  After spending the greater part of the afternoon researching film composer gadgets and software (specifically Pro Tools and Cubase), then walking to Safeway and back with a backpack full of groceries, I went out for pizza at an amazing pizza place called La Perla with my friends Adam and Desi!  Desi, Adam, and I were all members of the Oregon Marching Band baritone/euphonium section ("Beuphs") together my Freshman and Sophomore year, and both Adam and I have not seen Desi in the past 3 years!  Last night I saw on facebook that Desi was a little lonely / depressed, and since Adam and I are good friends with her I thought I'd see if the three of us could meet up for a little catch-up reunion.  It was really great to see Desi again (and great to see Adam, but I see him all the time anyway), and hear about what her life has been like since she has had her wonderful child Max (who's about 3 now).  Tonight was a venture back to the old marching band days, with the same awkwardly masked sexual innuendos coming from Adam, Desi's play off of Adam's words, and my simple enjoyment and comfort of being in their company.  Desi mentioned that the three of us should have a movie night!  I really hope that happens, because I know it would be really fun!

After having dinner with Desi and Adam, I led a brass ensemble euphonium sectional for an hour, and that went pretty well.  We're playing an arrangement of the funeral march from Wagner's Götterdämmerung:


The difficulties in the music are mostly rhythmic - our section has some problems lining up notes perfectly, so I asked them to do a lot of work away from the horn, and to think about a quarter-note triplet pattern against the normal pulse of the piece (a pattern of 3 against 4), to help finding the exact timing of the notes.  It's sounding a lot better now, so I think the sectional was indeed worth it.  I also gave them copies of a sight-singing warmup sheet (for intonation) that I was given for my adv. aural skills class, which deals with major, minor, and chromatic scales, and asked them to practice singing them with solfege while consistently check themselves for pitch at a piano.  I have learned that the ear training that comes from sight-singing in solfege has really helped my intonation, so I want to see if it will help the other members of my section in the same way.

Then when I got back home I did my counterpoint homework, which was to write "a bunch" (I did three) of bridges / sequences for our fugues.  A bridge or sequence is just a couple measures of music that repeats in a pattern, being vertically moved around (in a consistent pattern) to bring you from one key to another.  In this case, I need to get from the key of the dominant (roman numeral v) back to the tonic (roman numeral i).  My favorite of the sequences I made use a chromatic leading-tone motive in every repetition.

As the day passes, I feel very good about the day, because it was relaxing, I learned a lot about the software and hardware that will give me so much more to work with as a film composer, and I got to catch up with an old friend in good company  :-)
Today's been a good day!

It's Friday!

Today has been a particularly beautiful day!  The sky has been clear and the sun has been shining through, almost like a summer's day, but with cooler weather - if it weren't for the constant Oregon rain, I would not love this weather so much, so I am grateful to the rain  :-)

I had an aural dictation quiz in adv. aural skills today, and it went very well!  We were dictating 3-part  fugue beginnings this week, and next week we are going to start sight-singing whole-tone, octatonic, and some atonal melodies!  Though it's getting more and more difficult, it's fun and exciting, and it's awesome when your classmates are GTFs (graduate teaching fellows).  I always sit next to Jodi Jolley, who was my GTF for Sophomore level aural skills three years ago, and it feels so awesome to be at least to some extent at the same level as her - I really look up to my GTFs, and to see them as peers gives me comfort and determination to do the best that I can.  I meet a lot of these grad students in grad-level music theory courses such as Schenkerian Analysis, Counterpoint, and this aural skills class, and I've honestly considered staying at the UO for a Masters in music theory, but I think it's a better idea to chase my dream of film scoring.

I finally sent out an email to the six performers for my brass quintet piece that's being played on the February 19th Composers Forum concert, and we're going to set up rehearsal times.  I think we'll only need two or three rehearsals.  If we need a conductor I'm planning to conduct, but I'm not sure if I can guide a rehearsal very well since I've never actually guided one, but you don't know until you try!

This weekend I get to have tea with a wonderful person!  On Saturday I'm meeting a friend whom I met playing in the UO Quidditch League last year, but have never set aside time with to meet in person before.  I'm so excited, this is going to be a wonderful weekend!  :-)

As I type this, I realize that I haven't eaten anything in the past five or six hours.  This happens a lot - sometimes eating just seems less important than everything else, but when the hunger really starts to hurt I'm in no mood to make some elaborate meal, so I stress out trying to find something quick to prepare.  Last night I made spaghetti, and the night before I made a sandwhich, but three nights ago I went to a nearby restaurant (Agate Alley) for taco Tuesday (2 tacos and an imported Mexican beer for $7).  I sometimes find myself going out to eat when I'm too hungry to make something, but the wait ends up defeating the purpose.  I think tonight I'm going to make a hamburger, and maybe follow my grandfather's girlfriend Bev's advice of making a small salad to eat while you make the meal.

I'm going to go eat now  ^_^y

Learning of more amazing composers!

I've been finding out about some truly amazing composers whom I have never heard of until now!  After my advanced aural skills class on Monday, I talked to the professor Dr. Boss (a genius of atonality and twelve-tone style music, and a scholar of the composer Arnold Schoenberg) about my excitement towards learning how to sight-sing atonal music (which we'll be doing in two weeks), and I told him about how much I really like Schoenberg's tonal music, before he began his atonal phase.  This is an example of what I mean by his phase BEFORE atonality:

[Note:  for those who don't know, atonal music is music that is not in any key - not even temporarily.  To most people atonal music sounds like a bunch of random notes, but there is a mathematical construct behind it].  Here's an example of his atonal music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrjg3jzP2uI

Well, Dr. Boss told me about Schoenberg's best friend, a composer by the name of Alexander von Zemlinsky.  Schoenberg's first wife was actually Zemlinsky's sister.  Anyhow, I listened to Zemlinsky's music on YouTube, and found this gem:

Then today I was randomly searching through YouTube, and found a composer I have never heard of before by the name of Kurt Magnus Atterberg.  I'm amazed by how wonderful this piece of music is:

                         

It's amazing how much incredible music is out there, without even being noticed.  I'm grateful to the people on YouTube who have posted such iconic music.  As a composer, it gives me new ideas about how to capture certain feelings with music, while keeping the motives and the context interrelated.