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.

Saxophone Quartet looming in

For the UO Composers Forum, I am going to write a 4-6 minute piece for an intermediate saxophone quartet.  I've had about 3 weeks so far to work on it, but I have not even started it yet!  I only have about 3 1/2 weeks left to write the piece, and I find it so intimidating to work under a time crunch that I feel terrified to even start it!  This is something that I really need to transcend, because as a professional film composer I will probably always be in a time crunch.  I've heard that film composers write an average of 3 minutes of music per day.  I tend to write slowly, completing about 30 seconds to a minute of music on a good composing day.  I think it will be a lot easier though with film scoring, because it really helps to have a video to compose music to.  The most difficult thing I find as a composer of classical music is to develop a piece without any other information or context to work with.  When something happens (or doesn't happen) in a film, you can just write in fitting audio (though hopefully unexpected audio for the audience), and before you know it you have a lot more music written than you think.  When writing for a group of musicians without any context, it's like being part of the cast of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?", making up everything from the top of your head - except when writing music you can go back and change/edit everything you have written, which is what I spend most of my composing time actually doing.

Either way, I realize that I need to write this piece by week 8 of the term, so I better get started today!  At least I have come up with quite a few melody ideas, and wrote them down.  My plan is to use those ideas and spin them out into something with potential.  I have found that one simple idea can lead to millions (cue Hans Zimmer's score cue from Inception entitled One Simple Idea).

I've been playing Final Fantasy IX in my spare time, and I am so tempted to start playing that again, considering I am at a cliff hanger in the game, really close to the switch to disk four (out of four), and I also have piano practicing to do (I've been slacking off too much) for my lesson today at 3:30.

This blog is really putting things into perspective, because I realize how much more I really need to give to my major.  I spend a lot of my time relaxing, enjoying the feeling of not having to do anything, but for school there is a lot to do, even if school is just an illusion - it's an illusion that's worth it.

Film Scoring!

Well, last week my composition professor Dr. Rob Kyr began to show interest in helping me to become a film composer!  A recent graduate of the UO, Jeff Tinsley, got into USC's film scoring program last year, and I have high aspirations to follow in his shoes, which means that I need to create a film scoring demo as amazing as his.  This is not going to be an easy task - this is the main demo that got him into USC:

For that video "Raven", Jeff went through an incredible amount of work, time, and money after first just finding the video on the internet and taking out all of the sound.  He re-scored all of the music, recorded all of the voice-overs, recorded all of the sound effects, the most impressive part is everything behind the scenes with editing work (a good 40+ hours of work), and amassing a full orchestra with a good recording engineer (15+ hours of preparation).  Everything you hear in that video is Jeff's doing, along with people who helped him to realize his demo.  I recently asked him via facebook about the process he went through for this project, and he gave me the most amazing guidelines, that I know I will be able to use to create something great :-)

Rob Kyr told me that since we don't have a studio at the UO for recording and editing, I will have to ask Jeff what he did, and learn from him.  This may mean traveling to a film studio somewhere, or at least finding the people that can help me in this feat.  I am both extremely excited for this, and terrified by the fact that I don't know how to do any of it!  However, Rob Kyr's words last week made me realize that I am not alone, and that I really do have all the help I can possibly need - I just need to find the right contacts and ask for it.  Jeff is the most influential of all my contacts, I can't thank him enough!

I'm planning to stay in school for another two years (only one for my degree, and the second as a community member), so that I can create the greatest portfolio and film scoring demo that I can before applying for grad school.  As a perfectionist, I tend to compose music very slowly, because I spend most of the time going back and correcting or editing music that I have already written, rather than going straight to writing new music.  I feel that the more time I spend on a piece, the better it will reflect my own sense of musicality.  Because of this, I want to have as much time as possible to compile my portfolio before grad school applications.

Very first blog!

Hi all!

I have never written a blog before, and that's because I don't really feel like there is much to say about my life, except that I have high aspirations for improving myself as a human being, and am majoring at the UO in music composition.  I suppose I could write on here like a journal, and I might just do that.  I'm starting this because a few friends have some pretty interesting blogs, and I think it might be fun to let the world know what's going on in my life, and if I don't have any readers then it might at least help me to put things into perspective, like a journal.  I don't know how often I will update this blog, but this is a start!  :-)

~ Michael