Music: arranging chupacabra composing gooseneck wind quintet
by David
leave a comment
From the Island of Misfit Music
It’s easy for me to get stuck in transcribing mode. It’s the reason most ensembles contact me. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that; I’m glad I can help fill a need and I’m glad to have repeat customers. I find the work enjoyable and interesting and I appreciate the commissions, requests, and feedback I get from the players. But sometimes I forget to compose. There are certain expectations one has to deal with when arranging another composer’s music. Meeting them can be relatively easy, or it can feel like you’re working through a crossword puzzle, teasing the information out and moving things around as you go. Writing a piece from scratch is no walk in the park, of course, but it allows me to take a break from expectations and embrace my impractical side without fear of offending anyone. While cleaning up my website a few months ago I was surprised to realize that I hadn’t composed a new piece in about a year.
I reckon I’ve arranged around 150 pieces for wind quintet, but oddly enough I’ve never composed one. One of my resolutions this year was to write some quintets of my own. I have finished two so far:
National Parks Travel: Holbrook Mancos Mesa Verde Petrified Forest plunging to one's death wigwam
by David
leave a comment
Mesa Verde
Pictured above: our trip to Mesa Verde summed up in one awful photo. Not shown: one bent tie rod end, also awful.
One day the previous winter I was grumbling around- something about the National Park Service wanting to be my mother- after we were denied entrance into Petrified Forest because of icy roads. It should be our decision; ice is part of nature, too; they don’t have to come rescue us if we wind up in a ditch somewhere, I’ll even sign a waiver. On and on, but I was preaching to the choir.
Mundanity: chemical dependency misanthropy narcissim twitter
by David
leave a comment
Social Networking for Musicians
I compose and arrange chamber music and sell it online. There was a point when I worried a great deal about how my site appeared, not just to potential customers, but to search engines as well. I mean, I still do what I can. I still make sure everything works the way it’s supposed to, I still make sure the content is useful and easy to find, and that the site is uncluttered and on the plain side. What I no longer do (or try not to do) is stress out over Google search results, inbound links, PageRank, number of indexed pages, or the frequency with which bots crawl my site. Up to a point, that kind of stuff is out of my hands; I figure my time is better spent making music. That, I can control, and the rewards of my work are more readily apparent. Whereas with search engine optimization, I often had to wait weeks or months to see if Google liked what I had done, and even then the results were rarely clear cut. Sometimes my changes had a negative effect.
One thing I used to do far too often was run website grader reports. I have no idea how good their advice was, but it didn’t stop me from reading them and doing anything I could to get more traffic to my site. (One of the more humorous results was finding out the “readability level” of my site was “advanced/doctoral degree.” I have no idea if this was seen as positive or negative.) One of the suggestions that kept coming up was to give social networking a try. Facebook was right out, so I decided to give Twitter a shot. It didn’t last long. It made me feel dirty. And, since I only get a few hours of electricity per day out here at the shack, I decided it didn’t make sense to waste that time reading about where people were eating lunch.
But I did learn some things. While I wound up not playing the game myself, I did learn some of the rules. I learned how to get noticed and connect with other people. Here are some observations and tips for any musician wanting to jump into the world of social networking. I hope you find them useful.
Mundanity: anachronism death by ghost Route 66 video games
by David
leave a comment
Art and what it is
Do you ever feel like you’re behind the times? I do. Last April a man called Roger Ebert, a writer on motion pictures (aka “talkies”), wrote an article that caused a bit of controversy and made some dorks angry. Mr. Ebert made the bold statement that video games “can never be art.” This upset some people. I was off the grid at the time and was unable to join in the ruckus. However, I had an experience yesterday that could settle the debate once and for all. Allow me to share.
The Gizzard of Society: beer debt ceiling irony misanthropy Tonto Natural Bridge
by David
leave a comment
Word on the street from Joe Sixpack
While I’m bumming around town I sometimes catch glimpses of TV screens in public places: hotel lobbies, truck stops, plasma donation centers, etc. This constitutes the bulk of my TV watching. I saw a few moments of The Price is Right recently and was overcome with shame. I mean, I have a reclusive streak in me, but seeing just a few seconds of the show provided me with a hint of what it would feel like if I gave up and went into full shut-in mode. It wasn’t pretty. And, as a bonus, I could feel my brain cells dying.
Last week I saw a graphic on a cable news show. 66% of Americans support “Cap, Slap, and Tickle” or some such thing to resolve the debt ceiling crisis. So what? A few days prior to that, President Obama said that the majority of Americans are in favor of a combination of budget cuts and raising taxes on the rich (or, more accurately, setting the tax rate back to where it was pre-Bush) to get us out of this mess. Again, so what?
Night Heron
Some pictures from January. Our trip through Willcox, AZ happened to coincide with the Wings Over Willcox festival. But, since hanging out and watching birds with a group of strangers isn’t really our thing, we decided to forgo the tours and head out on our own. It was afternoon before we figured out where the cranes were roosting. It was impressive to see them, but they were too far afield to get any decent pictures. We happened upon this black-crowned night heron earlier in the day. He was hunting in a small lake and didn’t seem bothered by our presence.
