Daggertooth

Technically in the US it's another day, so another post!

I made some time to work on my fish movement by working during class! Lol.

This fish is called daggertooth. I drew it:

He is both menacing and silly. The daggertooth fish will stab you with his daggerteeth. But still he is a flopsy-fish, a fish-friend.

Score and midi link: http://christineelisechen.com/2017/11/21/daggertooth/

password: MoMNovember2017

Elegiac Suite - for Flute

I've had the time to finish up the Elegiac Suite, which I was posting here as a piece for Cor Anglais. I redid it as a flute piece, basically because I know a lot more flute players than Cor players, but the music is so simple it really will work for any wind instrument (bring on your kazoos)

Elegiac Suite:

Score and Audio here: dropbox

Can ya catch all the quotations? The Schumann one is, in my opinion, the most shameless - but if you all don't find it, I'll feel better about its inclusion.

hi friends! orchestral thesis

My schedule has been pretty prohibitive of composition lately. :( It means that things are taking longer to write than usual, because I have less time to work on them. I really wanted to finish a short movement of my fish piece and share it with you guys here!!! Soon. Over Thanksgiving break I hope to post up a storm of fishes!!!

I've had to de-prioritize fishes to work on the MSM orchestral thesis.

I thought I would share the second movement with you guys, while I'm doing all of this editorial stuff! I'll share about the first movement on my next post-- it's a bit of a different animal, and takes some explaining.

Here's the link to midi mock up and score: https://christineelisechen.com/2017/11/20/orchestral-thesis-for-mom-november-2017/

The password: MoM2017

Much love to everybody!

Canons for String Quartet

Here is a piece that I needed MoM to finish. This piece was a commission from AYO, for use in their chamber music programs - such a cool project, as I have many many fond memories of playing chamber music at camp! That being said, I've accidentally (like always though, so is it accidental?) written something quite difficult, so good LUCK to whichever quartet gets this in the mail.

Canons for String Quartet

Score and Audio here

15 second harp

If you don't know what 15 second harp is, check it out! Olivia is a lovely person and a great harpist, and currently is soliciting 15-second-long duets for harp and tuba. Today's MoM is also my 15sH.

19 Simple Phaser

Hey! After reading Alice's post, I thought it might be useful to make something that you can quickly hear a phase with, so I threw this together on Max tonight. It's got one of the Max samples loaded into it, so it should just be good to go as soon as you hit the toggle and turn on the audio.

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Day 18: Idea

Hey guys,

Over the last two days my right arm's been really bad. Even with left-handed computer use, I can't really get to a point where it's not sympathetically tensing. Like a back-seat driver, used to being dominant, ya know. Anyway I am terrified of RSI and the damage it may do to my output in the long run. I think I just need to take the pressure off with a few things,  including MoM, for a few days and try and hardly use the computer/piano/phone/pen at all.

Heres an idea for a piece though. A simple chord progression played in hushed, sustained semi-quavers on piano (Vatche?), recorded three times, the player with a click thats a few bpm different to the last for each recording. And with eternal repeats, they would go more and more out of phase in the actual phase way. By no means an original idea, but I'm excited to experiment with the chords bleeding into each other.

Finally, Happy Birthday Christine, you aquatic burst of light.

18 Longer phrases for precise ritardando

Hey,
So today was just a bit of an experiment. I normally work with polytempo structures inside of short phrases of like a bar or two, but today I thought I'd play around with a 64 note rit.

The steeper the curve the more dramatic the rit (right slows down at a faster rate):

I didn't have a great deal of time to put anything too musical together on it, So I just stacked all 11 of these 8 bar ritardando on top of each other to hear what it sounded it like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Have a great weekend :)

Orchestral Thesis Piece

Today's is DEFINITELY not a 'one-a-day' composition. For our masters' degrees, the thesis component is a piece for orchestra, and Christine and I have been working hard (?) on these pieces, in advance of their deadline on the 28th.

Mine is done, although it needs to be renotated as a better score, flutes, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones 1&2 on the same stave, and so on. This is going to happen some time after my lesson today, but I'd LOVE some feedback, as I've still got 10 days to work on it. Please tell me what you think!

Peter Looked:

This piece is an orchestrated excerpt from my monodrama, The Mermaid. For those of you who have heard it, you might remember this as the interstitial music, describing a lover whom the central character has tried to excise from her life. He looks for her, and eventually falls out of love. This piece is trying to describe the combination of cathartic joy and loss, what she internalises from the experience, and something she's not quite ready to accept in her life, even though she wants to.

On a side note, the performance of these pieces in Feb will be inside a humungous church, with very washy acoustics. ALSO, the percussion on the track is buggy as hell

Score & Audio here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mghuu0omxxoolyx/AABnZr23i7c1dXRHRvhdcJR1a?dl=0

some deep sea sketching

Worked on my fishes yesterday/today.

The lanternfish makes up 65% of the biomass at these deep levels of the sea. Unlike other deep sea fishes, they look fairly harmless and almost cute.

image credit: Emma Kissling [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Lanternfish is going to be the lush center movement of this piece, as it's the only fish I'm including that isn't terrifying. I have some chords, but I'm not sure how I'll use them yet!

Matador (parts 1 and half of 2)

Here is the start of a new project, based on a libretto by Lewis-Allan Trathen. Brag, we're working on a longer-form opera type piece together, and this was a poem he sent me early on, not exactly related to the final idea. I'm working my way through it (I'm about half-way there) and I think I'm going to add some percussion and a double bass to the final version. I'll try and get a midi-mockup for when it's done... but GOD do I hate the way Sib performs this piece.

17 Counting and playing fluctuating tempo

So today I had a go at trying to play the fluctuating 2 bar tempo groove I posted a few days ago. Today's post is just a log of the things I noted while practicing this.

The first thing I wanted to mention is that I had genuinely had a lot fun trying to play on it. I enjoyed the challenge and feel its totally possible to feel (as in a human-like rhythmic interpretation as a groove) computer-precise accelerandos and ritardandos between accents placed within of a bar

This is the notation I used, the spacing is still weird and unprecise, in fact the second last accent is out by quite some way, but hopefully you get the idea.

Below is the piano roll. I actually ended up reading this while recording, as the playback has the bar to show where you are in the bar as a kind of visual score.

The rhythmic division of the fluctuating tempo inside of the the consistent tempo is this as follows.

bar 1
7 notes decelerate from 141bpm to ~93bpm in the space of 5 semiquavers at ~90bpm
3 notes decelerate from ~93bpm to ~83bpm in the space of 3 semiquavers at ~90bpm
5 notes decelerate from ~83 bpm to ~59bpm in the space of 7 semiquavers. at ~90bpm

bar 2 (a reflection of the first bar)
5 notes accelerate from ~59bpm to ~83 bpm in the space of 7 semiquavers at ~90bpm
3 notes accelerate from ~83 bpm to ~93bpm in the space of 3 semiquavers at ~90bpm
7 notes accelerate from ~93bpm to 141 bpm in the space of 5 semiquavers at ~90bpm

The bpm numbers are now totally different as I've slowed the master clock down for practicing from ~90 bpm to 64bpm.

I approached my practice on thispretty methodically, in a similar way to how I approach improvisation on irregular meters. Here's the summary of what I did.

- practice clapping, counting and improvising in straight 4/4-7/8 with drums from track (represented as the clave in notation). Though the notation is more accurately 4/8-7/16, I'm just counting 8th notes as pulses.
- listen to melody playback through ableton over and over whilst drinking coffee.
- practice and memorise melody. I intentionally left the Ab phrygian tonality. Thinking Bb phygian on tenor sax means lots of side keys. For me that kind of forces your hands to be more accurate or something, I dunno...
- get the runs in time to each accent, progressively added more as you go.
- record and listen back.

So the first audio example is me playing with the synthesiser and drums in my headphones, the second (at 0:22) is me with only percussion, and the the third (0:44) is me playing with no synth, but a tambourine playing the fluctuating tempo. I was happiest with the last take, and included it with and without the synth playing precisely along with me.

Next week I'll be trying to get some new melodies happening on it. woo

Day 16: Extra Comfort Music

I've added higher voices and I'm stoked with how it all turned out - get ready to be comforted, friends. Hard.

alicechance.com/comfort-music

16 Quintuplets

Just having a bit of a practice today.

I want to make my beat sub-divisions of 5 as strong as they are for 2, 3, 4 and 6. I was practicing improvising on the attached audio moving between different sub-divisions. I would've posted audio of myself playing, but it sounded crap and I've run out of time for today :( Will try again over the weekend though.

helllooooooooo

I think this might be the last of my Sara Teasdale contralto pieces. I tried to push myself into faster and more rhythmically interesting territory, rather than doing my usual slow sad thing. :) I might want to add clapping or a hand drum to this also...

Madrigal - Police, police!

I didn't post yesterday, but I did see Thomas Adés' The Exterminating Angel with Christine, which was totally amazing. There was chilling use of police sirens and martial drums, and it's only half a coincidence that I wrote a piece called 'Police, police!' today.

Day 15: Comfort Music

My whole day, including the writing of this piece, was affected by watching the announcement of the postal survey this morning. I wrote this for anyone affected and hurt by it in the last few months, (including myself I think, but not as much as some.)

You can make and serve Recipe 3 at alicechance.com/infinityfordinner

ps. I recorded higher parts but I also think this piece is enough how it is. Planning to experiment with the higher parts tomorrow.

15 Musical Fractal Zoom on the Lost Woods Theme

Day 14: Composition Portfolio

Hey everyone, my submission today is my composition portfolio

Would especially like feedback on the formatting of my scores because I've been told before that I need to make them look more professional and more publishable.

Looking forward to having a catch up tomorrow on what everyone's been writing in the last few days!

14 Lost Woods Fractal

Today I made a musical fractal. The first two bars of the Lost Woods theme from the Legend of Zelda is deconstructed to show that it is made from a sped up copy of its own melody. Adam Neely explains how here.

The Drover's Wife - Overture

A little aside, a small foray into a passion project of mine.

Audio here

Day 13: Portfolio progress

Hello mates,

I am working hard to get my portfolio ready to submit tomorrow for uni. Part of it includes the solo sextet + SATB arrangement of 299792458 (which I will call 'the speed of light') Be assured, I have made progress over the last two days but nothing I really want to upload yet. The full score will come tomorrow though. In the mean time, please enjoy this extremely secret and not publicly sharable link to the rough mix from the premiere.

13 Fluctuating 2 bar - experiments01

Had a good muck around with some ideas from yesterday's post today. The two bar fluctuating tempo has three convergence points in each bar. I've moved it to 15/16 time signature. The accents in the changing tempo are in groups of 7,3,5, and they align with the 1st, 6th and 9th semiquavers of the steady tempo. Tomorrow the plan is to try and play this on my instrument and see how it feels. Audio and an attempt at some notation for it below. The melody below comes in after about a minute on the soundcloud link.

How far is it to Heaven?

I decided to write this when I found myself manically repeating "not all tenors are idiots", in an attempt to stave off that 'let's quit choir' feeling after rehearsal tonight. 

Score & Audio here

Text by my bae, Emily Dickinson:

How far is it to Heaven?
As far as Death this way --
Of River or of Ridge beyond
Was no discovery.

How far is it to Hell?
As far as Death this way --
How far left hand the Sepulchre
Defies Topography.

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:

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

blahhhh

Kurt

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!

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.

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.

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!