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.

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.

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.

Day 2: Deconstructed Marais Demo

This is today's progress on Deconstructed Marais (working title... am I taking this culinary thing too far?)

Today I recorded myself playing Menuet 7 (sans double) from the 5th book of Marin Marais' Pièces de viole. Without repeats (there will be enough of those!)

I recorded it in mostly two-bar phrases then made them be one after the other pretty much as it would normally be played. In the repeat of the whole thing, I allowed more of a breath between each. For each clip, I measured the distance between it's very start and the very start of the next one. I replicated this distance each time. There are 6 takes in each track before it loops.



In the coming days, I will get this all ready for the Youtube loop situation. But for now, please enjoy this demo. I love that it has turned out so sparse, with increasingly pained bursts. One thing I plan to experiment with is having the continuo part looping constantly, miserably, underneath.

ps. Having that Double written there is making me want it! Maybe one out of the six can be the double equivalent of the two bar clip. Or maybe I just want it because it is in view and less is more.

02 Work in progress - Metric modulation through accelerando

Metric modulation between 3:2, 1:1 back to 3:2 through calculated accel and decelearando of tempi.


🌞

deep sea fishes

I'm writing some pieces about deep sea fishes.

This one is the outlier. The others will be big chamber ensemble pieces?? Maybe?? This one's a bloop-blart.

Here is a list of deep sea fishes.

Anotopterus: Daggertooth

Malacosteus: Stoplight Loosejaw

Alepisaurus ferox: Long Snouted Lancetfish/Cannibalfish

Dissostichus mawsoni: Antarctic Toothfish

Evermannellidae: Sabertooth Fish

Lanternfish

Madrigal: Ladybird, Ladybird!

The first of probably a couple madrigals for voice octet. This one's verging on impossible, so SongCo expect my email soon lol

The recording uses a harpsichord sample, for obvious reasons

MoM 1 FTW

Title got cut off - november prelude. Just some piano notes. MoM makes you make decisions! Great way to start the day.

01 Divide by primes

Today I made Ableton divide a Dr Dre. kick sample by every prime number ascending then descending between 1 and 1000. Things got really whacked around 600-800 (around 1:05). I have no idea why.

- I'm interested in the scale that emerges as rhythms become pitches.
- Twin primes (primes that are separated by 2, such 41, 43 or 809, 811) create "markers" in the scale as their pitch is almost indistinguishable.

peace,

Day 1: Scuse me while I pace myself

Hi friends,

Very excited to use the first day of MoM to launch something I've been dreaming about for a month or so:

Infinity for Dinner is an online recipe book for installations you can set up anywhere. It takes advantage of Youtube's loop feature (Ctrl Click and tick 'Loop') to allow audience members to recreate my phase installations wherever they are.

During Month of Music, I am not going to create a new composition or installation every day

*aaawwww*

What I do hope to do is make significant progress every day and list it here. For example, today I have:

• Edited two videos of Slipping Away the first recipe
• Created a facebook page for Infinity for Dinner
• Made edits on the website, like providing a link to the score and example videos

So, during MoM, the three things I will be doing are:

• Coming up with/making Infinity for Dinner ideas
• Showing when significant progress has been made on the few concert pieces I'm working on at the moment
• Showing significant administrative progress towards Infinity for Dinner or my website in general

Something I also plan to do this month is hold installation concert evenings in my room in my parent's backyard. I will call it 'Infinity for Dinner + Dinner' - I will set up one of my installations in my room and serve dinner. I hope to have held three of these concerts by the end of the year. Kurt, Josie, Will and Toby, I'd love you to come!

Alice

Variations on The Apricot Tree - I. Theme

First post!

The composer Komitas was one of the 1.5 million who died in the Armenian Genocide. Given the act of terror that occurred in New York a few hours ago, this melody has an added layer of melancholy, aside from the importance it already bears. For this reason, my setting of the theme is simple, only the rhythm having been altered.
This is the start of a set of variations I'm planning on composing, in chunks, over the next four weeks.

Here we go

Hi everyone,

Feeling that familiar tingle I like to called aprehinsparation. Really looking forward to witnessing what you all squeeze out of your brains this coming month.

Friends like all of you are what's kept me going in previous MoMs and I anticipate a similar dependence this time around. But right now, I'm excited and bursting.

Let's go!

Love, Alice