the piece I wrote after that last post lol sorry

NEW MUSIC EVERY DAY

Sunday, 12 November 2017

Madrigal - That that

Another WEIRD madrigal... hmm 'Weird Madrigals' might be a good collective title, although 'Very-difficult-to-sing Madrigals' still seems to be more true. Also, as my first one was called Ladybird Ladybird and as the next one I have in mind is called Police police I'm now desperately searching for more texts with two-word titles.

Here's That that





And here's a mockup: that that

12 Two bar fluctuating tempo.

Soup,

So late last night I started working on what will be my first attempt at larger scale work using my max objects. I started developing a precise rhythmic cell that has 4 (tomorrow I will be trying to make it converge 6) convergence points between a steady and fluctuating tempo across 2 bars. Making this was some srs hardc0r3 excel spreadsheetz.

So the accelerating voice has 32 16th notes across two bars, where the 10th lines up with beat 3 and the 17th with beat 1 of steady voice. The reverse takes place in the second bar. It's just expressed on percussion now so I can easily here all the voices, this will be transferred to melody stuff later this week.

Here's the audio:


Commissions? Contracts? Bach/Rachmaninov!

Different sort of post today, although I might try to do some composing later...

I recently experienced a reminder of why it's good to get money-4-music details in writing, in advance. I'm a lucky boy to get commissions the way I do, but I've had quite a few go wrong, and it's always sad to feel undervalued. As a matter of fact, my recent upload Elysium was composed for a hand-shake-agreement commission that never paid up.

I attended a talk given by the vice president of concert music from ASCAP (the U.S. affiliate of APRA, for the Aussies in the room) and she advocated strongly for composers to make their own contracts, even in commissions amongst friends. Her point was mostly about copyright: composers must hold onto their copyright, especially when we don't all have litigious publishers to do it for us.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, so forgive me: I've been using a version of this contract for a few years, and I thought I'd share it here. All it takes is a reassuring smile and a 5 minute discussion to fill it out, and your rights will be secure.

Contract template here:

And just because it makes me feel so good, here's another excerpt from the recording sesh last night with Vatche:




Saturday, 11 November 2017

Day 11: Dank Saturday

Toby cries tears of apology for not contributing to MoM yet.

Nocturne no.2 - Cradle Song

This is another aside-to-MoM piece, as it was a June composition. I was in the studio with Vatche, and we decided to run off a quick recording, and it turned out great!

Vatche has agreed to record piano pieces written during MoM, so consider writing a piece for piano over the next few days. I'll let you know what the recording date will be, but it won't be for a little while so no rush.

Here's the nocturne:




And here's the poem, from which this takes its name:

Cradle Song

The angels are stooping
Above your bed;
They weary of trooping
With the whimpering dead.
God's laughing in Heaven
To see you so good;
The Sailing Seven
Are gay with His mood.
I sigh that kiss you,
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you have grown. 


W.B.Yeats

11 chords+sound design

Busy weekend for me! Spent a bit of time improvising some harmonic movements at my keyboard, recorded (on my iphone then airdropped it to my computer because I'm too lazy go out to my car to connect one fucking 1/4" lead to my sound card that would've sounded heaps better smh...), then played around with Ableton's resonators and redux to bring out some different colours. Make it more digital or whatever.



10 Maths stuff

Trying to think about acceleration in a different way to my other patches today. Though built of the same fundamental objects, the timing and organistation of this method is a different approach which I don't understand fully yet.

Here's the general set up for it. A "draft" max patch.
<pre><code>
----------begin_max5_patcher----------
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-----------end_max5_patcher-----------
</code></pre>


I'm asking some mathy friends for some help, here's the video to that too.

blahhhh

Kurt

Friday, 10 November 2017

Day 10: Harmonic plan for max satisfaction

In my recent big song cycle, Fiat Lux, there was a movement for solo sextet and electronics about the speed of light. The text I wrote was:

Immediacy in the known universe is illegal
There is no instant, recipients must wait
Waiting times vary, but the speed limit is constant
299792458

Metres per second, the speed of light
Though light rarely reaches this goal
Obstacles bend, reflect and refract
The limit's reserved for black holes

I was using the numerals as a source for pitch and rhythmic material in the work: scale degrees and note lengths. I wanted this really climactic, knock your socks off ending, but tbh it ended up a bit blue balls.

I'm now arranging the piece for solo sextet with SATB accompaniment and I'm having another crack at the end. Today I wrote out the harmonic plan. I plan to combine this with an accel. and very clear climactic signposting from the SATB accomp.



Elysium - Live Recording

Today I thought I'd share the live recording from a concert on Monday, in which my lovely friends Katie McKay and Vatche Jambazian played the third mvt of my viola sonata, entitled Elysium.

Score & recording, in dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/83oq4bj9kkl7j9i/AACLA_rzICKNUGC2BQOsK1nFa?dl=0


Contraflunctus continued

Made two versions of the opening Fl. 1 line for an episode - not sure I like either. I'll make a few more tomorrow and see if the iterations lead to "the right one." This feels like one of those moments where things go slowly for a bit, then POOF! the piece is done. Here's to hoping!

Thursday, 9 November 2017

Day 9: Pressing softly

Had an interesting experience today where I really wanted to play the piano at Toby's house, but it's outside his Dad's office. I did anyway, but I definitely felt a lot more cautious than I normally do when starting an improvisation and don't think I ever escaped hearing things via osmosis through a busy man's ears. Resulted in musical choices I may not have otherwise made and a general hesitance in the ideas. Turned out more sweet than stressful, I think!




09 Accelerating Noise

This soundscape was made by having samples of looped noise from Ableton's operator accelerate so rhythms become pitches. Some cool sounds emerged!

Variations on The Apricot Tree III - Arabesque

Another time-consuming variation. I swear, the next one's going to be a four part harmonisation.




Wednesday, 8 November 2017

Fell Asleep Yesterday. Whoops

Yesterday I slept through my alarm in the morning, made it to work okay, worked on Contraflunctus after 9pm after putting the baby to sleep, waited for my wife to get home who has a better phone for music pictures, but fell asleep and so didn't post! Progress yesterday: I rewrote the last beat from the previous day and finished what I think is some kind of wonky sequence, #Contraflunctus.

This morning, setting up the scaffolding with ascending arpeggiations to move the harmony while introducing what will be a dizzy augmentation of the opening flute 1 part over various figurations in the other parts - I'll call it 7th species cpt.

It's really fun working on music that "obeys," pokes, and laughs at cpt rules while trying to work through my own intuitive sense of vertical/horizontal note relationships. It feels great to be shedding years of obeisance to THE RULES. I bet Bach had MoM every month, thus creating unstoppable cpt powers. Cpt is musical crossfit.

Day 8: 081

I had a great time workshopping this with Oli a couple of weeks ago. Just got to notating it today.





08 Polyrhythm sliding

Yellow,

This one is a development from a week ago. The idea is to "slide" a rhythm through an accelerando to a new tempi to create a polyrhythm against another voice.

I'm going to keep working with this idea over the month and see what I can develop from it.



hey guys!!!

soooooo I have been pretty stressed out so I missed a couple of days-- I did the last of these three Sara Teasdale settings... brought back some themes and things... I found it hard to set the end of the text because I'm not religious but want to honor Sara Teasdale's faith (seems like it was pretty important to her)

I can't be fucked to do dynamics/articulations at this moment, so I'll have to do them tomorrow!

By the way guys, everybody is killing it, I'm loving all your stuff!! xx

p.s. i messed up the tempo derp, should be a bit faster starting at I will raise it. argh

Apricot Tree variation no.2 - stupid idea, never try this

Never try to do this in Sibelius, entirely bad idea.




Tuesday, 7 November 2017

Day 7: Sliced Marais ready to go

Hi everyone,

Today's work was getting the Marais happening on my website. I made a Demo video which I think will be very helpful in making it approachable.

Please head to my site to have a look!

Let me know how you go setting up the installation. It's worth having it going for an hour or so (even if most of that is on mute) because it gets JUICY AF after a while.

I had a great lesson with Paul (Stanhope) today where he gave me some awesome advice on how to progress with my large ensemble piece. I did a little bit of work on it but will upload once I've done more and make a day of it!

Much love to you all.

07 71117

What a beautiful number today's date is! Unfortunately this composition has no intentional number significance with it at all. I'm sure there's some numerology in there if you look deep enough. This was composed by improvising a melody and working through the harmony slowly at the keyboard. I intend for it to be part of a larger form, perhaps a C of an AABC jazz form.




Mourning Song for Cor Anglais

Final piece in my Elegiac Suite. Time to trim and tuck, and then move on to more things tomorrow!

Day 6: Pouring some continuo over the deconstructed Marais

Hey mates, keen to hear thoughts on the way I've used the continuo line here. I'm starting to feel it was better when the thing was sparse and full of silence. I guess when it's it's own youtube video it could just be turned down or off.




Contraflunctus 11/6

Difficult morning, but I love the one measure and the ideas swimming around as a result.

Monday, 6 November 2017

06 Risset Rhythms 2

Alright getting closer now... Insert "MAXed out" pun here.

I'll give it another dig over the week. Tomorrow I'm writing something non-computery.

<pre><code>
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</code></pre>

Sketch

Sorry for getting so personal even though I don't know anyone who is going to read this! I think this piece is my way of expressing watching my baby grow up faster than I think I'm ready for - there are lots of experiences we're not ready for but happen. It's an incredible experience watching a new person experience the world. I think it's why the movies Up and Inside Out are so powerful despite being disguised as kids' movies. I think one of the challenges of this piece is going to be keeping a sense of beauty while at the same time learning how to musically express discovery and an evolving experiential being. Also, I don't have a text so that will just have to come later as the words seem right, but I know I want a voice in there somewhere.

Musically, it's looking like diatonicism is functioning as a beginning state and each level of harmonic modulation and discovery adds new dimension to the experience: the F# being lifted out of the initial F harmonic area, moving the harmony to G, G# and C# suggesting and arriving in an A territory, but with Bb reflecting on F, and so on.

Notes so I know where to continue from next time I sit down to write:
*each part becomes active then examines harmonies and newness
*relationship between beautiful and painful developments
*some sections moved to before being fully prepared, some fully aware

Danza Alta for Cor Anglais

Cor anglais piece no.4, one away from being done with this I think!

more teasdale more contralto

Hi guys! I'm trying extending text more, rather than always doing syllabic word for word setting.



05 Risset Rhythms

Aight so I'm going to try and wrap my head around Risset Rhythms and understand them on a fundamental level over the next few days.

What it sounds like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQf_tS5WAP4
http://www.timohoogland.com/risset-rhythm-effect/

Maths governing it:
http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/papers/2011/Stowell2011icmc.pdf

What I started with:
https://cycling74.com/articles/risset-glissandos-and-strange-loops-2

What I came up with on max today:

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Sunday, 5 November 2017

Day 5: Sore Arm

Hey guys,

I woke up with quite sore tendons and muscles in my right arm. Was at first tempted to write a left hand piano etude or something but just thought in general I would avoid the computer and musical instruments for a day. An enforced day off. Fingers crossed (loosely) that all is back to normal tomorrow.

Keep up the amazing work xx

I set some sara teasdale today

for solo contralto/someone who can sing that E below middle C

Extra post... Sleigh ride of spring


Guess who's in an Xmassy mood

Elegy - for solo cor anglais

Part 3 of my voyage anglée


Sketch

This is one of those that takes a long time to get to know in the moment - it's like getting to meet a new person and needing more history through long, slow, and thoughtful conversations. I feel like I've been wanting to write this piece for a long time, but MoM is now making me do it, thank goodness. I think I'll be coming back to this one lots throughout the month. Andante, quietly, unaffected and even.

Saturday, 4 November 2017

Day 4

back to fishes

Hey everybody!

Here on Day 3 I'm back to thinking about fishes. I also finished one particularly thorny long term project!!!

First thing: I attempted playing Frogfish on the piano. I'm not the best pianist, but it's not bad! Wanted to share that with you guys.

Second thing: Inspired by Alice working on her big ensemble piece, I started the first movement of my Deep Sea Fishes piece. I think I'll use this instrumentation:

Piano, 2 Fl., Ob., 2 Cl., Bsn., Vla, Vc, Cb. Possibly percussion??

The first movement will be the Sea, and the subsequent movements will be character studies of individual weird deep sea fishes. I sketched some sea music today- I'll post a scan of the sketch, but it's probably impossible for anyone to read other than myself.

Third thing: A string orchestra piece I've been working on for a long while is finally done!!! I'm free!!!! Mostly. Might still need to do some editorial stuff. It's so many pages, so I'm posting a password protected link to the PDF and midi!

String orchestra link: http://christineelisechen.com/2017/11/03/piece-for-string-orchestra/
The password: MoMNovember17

Frogfish link:
https://soundcloud.com/christine-elise-chen/frogfish-on-piano

Saltarello - for Cor Anglais

I enjoyed yesterday's Cor Anglais piece so much, I decided to do another.




04 Zippy

Todays gonna be a busy one so I just put this together before heading off to bed. Here's a lil beat with randomly selected accels/rits in specific start and end points.

Contraflunctus unfin.

I was having too much fun with this and so didn't want to wrap it up as a mini with my 2 hours this morning. Love cpt. It's also really difficult, but I found this piece in the context of MoM to be great at getting me to be efficient with my decisions and stay focused on where the cpt was going in the moment and into where the music might go. Don't know duration/form/etc. yet, but enjoying the process.

Friday, 3 November 2017

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.