I have mouthed off quite a lot about what it means to write music for a computer’s idiom in meatspace. I think I’ve been mouthing off about it for as long as I’ve been writing music. I don’t know why I haven’t written much about it, because it very much informs how I think about composition for computers. Continue reading
I have spent the last several years trying to figure out what to do with myself, having given up on finding a tenure track faculty job somewhere. I found it was really hard to be productive without being part of an active artistic community. I also found it was really hard to be productive without having access to a 24 hour coffee shop with free wireless. Heck, I’d settle for a coffee shop that closes at midnight–the kind I used to go to if I wanted to make sure they’d kick me out at some point so I’d wake up in time to be at a morning appointment. Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes creativity work. On the one hand, I seem to be a fairly creative person who has original ideas. On the other hand, I’ve met very few people who think as rigidly as me. Actually, I only have one friend (who I know of) who is as spatially rigid as me–she’s the only other person who doesn’t think it’s OK to put the cinnamon back somewhere vaguely in the vicinity of where it came from instead of just putting it back in exactly the same spot where it was before. She does amazing drawings, which has gotten me thinking about how creativity and rigidity mesh. Continue reading
I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been writing a new piece.The music is pretty much done, but I’m stuck when it comes to finishing it. It feels so close that it hardly seems worth writing about it before it’s complete. On the other hand, the piece has now been waiting for that one last thing for a while now, so it seems worth writing about that. Continue reading
Really good new music or art. It’s got to be new. It’s got to be something I haven’t seen before. Usually when I’m not composing it’s because I’m feeling disconnected from the music-making community which makes my work feel irrelevant. Since I’m in a small town and there aren’t a lot of musicians I can go hang out with, art and music become a proxy for community. A good piece of art makes me feel connected–like maybe my music matters too. Continue reading
Last weekend, I went up to the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs to check out Doug Van Nort‘s Constellate, which is installed in the Tang’s elevator. It’s open until October 14–that gives people a couple of weeks to catch it. Continue reading
The other day, I was invited to take part in a concert hosted by the Albany Sonic Arts Collective with Jason Lescalleet and the Pitcher/Chen/Van Nort Trio.
I don’t intend to review the concert–I’m not a good reviewer. I get caught up in the music and a few disjointed points might stick with me later, but not enough to write up a concert in a way that does anyone justice. The best I can do is tell you that the entire concert rocked, which lacks specificity. Instead, what you get is my self-reflexive take on my performance.
One of the things a lot of composers I’ve talked to wrestle with is the problem of performance. We’ve specialized and aren’t performers. We write virtuosic works for virtuosic performers of instruments we can’t play virtuosically ourselves.
I haven’t blogged for a while because I realized that I’d been doing a lot of explaining why I was leaving academia and not so much engaging in my compositional process. Today, I’d like to figure out why.
I’m struggling to come up with an idea for a micro-composition today. I have a few tricks I can use to just generate raw material, but that is unsatisfying. I used them in earlier sketches that I don’t even want to copy, so obviously I reject this material. I think one problem is that I keep feeling like I have to generate traditional musical material. This is just not my idiom. Maybe I’m having trouble with this piece because I have a sense that I need to write something traditional.