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.
<pre><code>
----------begin_max5_patcher----------
1178.3oc0ZssbZqCE8Y3qPielCi0Ee67az91Y5jQXqBpGYaFa4zjSm1u8itX
GHMXUQ.LNyj.Xgh0Zs2Ks1Rx4GKWDro9IVa.3uA+CXwherbwBSS5FVze8hfR
5S4BZqoaA40kkrJYvJ62IYOIMs+4cLPaWIn9q.o5i40BAf2Z9rfUsUty9Mpl
JYxl5U.trEzPkLcunftVVCnf8UdEq.T0Utg0LLDBUa40cUlwA223dpLeGuZ6
CMrboE+nz30nnU.TDbc3J.LJU+FIYcH3K8+U7BCVq27s+Ja31qFr5NofIM7K
ru0V4yBloyG0Od0P2f5194xk5WVcEhbzRMA0gnpZIqEvqNDEUbWT.1v.63a2
MRXAMdXAmQVmnBKPb1Z8aQg5vBFe5vBdxCKUruqF32DUD0zhMzpsAiyLXb15
LXbbBZEvxpXyqHzo4F5zbC12psI4y6Y1aefY3e4FMgJhOIoMRGDON5EdC605
VhGdZhSRmQhc0zcirVvak549eePdmSE4cBkiPw5yUiiBiLZ7zzihFiIwIISd
znj01R2xdSz.5RciLbwRIDzkvl.OSks2pZzUjrgtTzYZ90yUiO0XbEmMm35H
lW4Bd9+9K.bs8GGDGoRyCykwgF9m5LWiSNS92x2VQE2TeLY81sBlmrru7LhL
75IYI1MK2Sanp0QvZdfUQ2X4S3XQ.t1+3KSdELy5bTI0vPeiLII5XRh67O7V
VE68LGf8eEz7e4YcZbjgijngWOIGCuHG5qooUqrduKpgIGRejrgxNNVCRxbx
9ZSmTVW4feXSkTnGyXQj41pqFYZoDrAv8TsNjRcurxQTqHmLe0cyWxVbxSQc
eMIhSOIX17qlzHjufInO6a125Giybx8j4le7Xoc85nUaxFBH+4I7V+Y2Uhfw
ml4DW0gWoIp82yQ9GcKL2NNW2uzSmVbP3byharpVD0NgcspCLgrlnXdZxK4Z
2yvS+HrACLHw8Zs5OfHuXbxGAFi.otYLRIqSwpzsmrN9i.qgfLmr9340dw5n
OBaorVH7stEB6Qcqyz79Xma+8zF5F8QVwCpgUg2GnRYCWYNaO24EuDFVDvJ2
vLHLzzfIvcsDM4BFswU.DFdzQHE4bEejoPuX9aLm.1uc97Fvqa+0Qg15tl7g
Qr2yFb.9ErVIuhJ4pRhG5C7U8YGunfUc7NsJ3s5sWeHo7lrgunIYVgl3YEZh
lUngLqPi9799yvQmOwSCd7QHqO.C+iOC1FMErlwWI30Gfv2K.uvHH1G.NgJL
nO3IYxvCxKqxIDO9XH7aI02hmRdw9Z0V9ZGdpjlGFI19PNhhMu8pqPv9ZvHy
VULKrAd7C35FJQ8hxv362jbT3LSi7Z+DG3ANM3wmvyzYw.yl4EM7Gf2ohFPu
LEytjH3T.v3yykDlj8h4GNzrqNh8.oO74dWyiLT8yg7BEL9rBZ8yk98KXl..
Bui5EeV0Q5LGeI2QGKev2EUgFc6wWzkfO7kgOOfGJ7cVgzd1Ez86ej0z1eOM
HInj9sZC5SVYtjWYuz7+0WPC6Q9P+ssPax2wkrbYWi8bSdJ1d5KAk0p3PUGu
WJoF4et7+AHNUpHA
-----------end_max5_patcher-----------
</code></pre>


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.