Day 3: A piano score of moments

Hi mates,

So lately I've been really struggling with a challenge set for me by my teacher to write a piece for chamber ensemble of:

Fl & or picc, cl & or bcl, tpt, hrn, tbn, sop sax, alto sax, ten sax, bar sax, pno, 1 perc, 2 vln,vla, vcl, bass

I have had a really hard time getting inspired to write this piece. I've been so excited by the Infinity for Dinner stuff and have felt I don't really have anything to say for an ensemble like this. I have about zero experience writing music for large ensemble without voices in the first instance. I have always started with something smaller and orchestrated it. Toby gave me some great advice to make a banger, something I love not something to be impressive.

So I decided to start with piano and orchestrate second. I've put in a few orchestratey suggestions to myself but to be honest the emotions I feel towards this piece are embarrassment, stubbornness and a lack of passion. (Maybe armour for the underlying emotion of insecurity/fear of writing orchestral stuff?)

Anyway, here are today's sketches:

03 Divide a kick by fibonacci numbers

So this little Ableton noodle came from doing the same thing as my first post but this time using fibonacci numbers to divide a kick sample. This one failed in achieving anything interesting sonically.

To clarify what I'm using Month of Music for, I intend on writing a series of studies using a max patch I made that creates midi grids in polytemporal preportion. A lot of this stuff will be chaos.



with love,
Kurt

no fishes this time

Hi friends!

I've been working on this piece for women's choir for a little while now, so it's not purely MoM. (I'm going to be posting a lot of pieces like that, as I have a lot of pots on a lot of burners at the moment.)

We're doing a Stephen Leek piece in this aussie-music-in-nyc choir that I really like which uses some cool techniques. Some of you guys may know it, it's called Kondalilla and it's really beautiful. (I really ripped off Stephen Leek guys. Srsly. But hopefully it's still recognizably mine and not his.)

I wanted to commandeer his techniques (voices moving independently within a section, moving freely out of time) and write an incantation for women's voices. I've been playing with the idea of an incantation a lot lately. There's a lot there-- incanting, witchcraft, spells, rituals, etc. For me, witchcraft is synonymous with powerful women. As an archetype, the witch in stories is often the only woman with real power. This piece really is like a spell for a coven, and in a larger sense, it's an exploration of the power of saying no when we're socialized to be accommodating always.

I've been trying to puzzle through how to communicate this idea to other people, worked on it some more tonight. I'd love to see if people can actually make sense of the score!

Morning Song

The cor anglais is so often an instrument of mourning, here I have a variant! Score is in C, forgot to write that.

Lullaby

Starting singing this tune last night when carrying the baby around the apartment. She gave me a high five when she heard it this morning - which means a lot because if she doesn't like a piece, she'll actually start crying sometimes.