Why taking Jazz History is kick-a** during finals week

So it’s finals week. You make it to the BYU testing center, nervous but eager to get your test over with. But your last final isn’t on chemistry or advanced calculus or business or even English. No, you’ve taken jazz history this past semester, and it’s time to take the final listening ID test. You grab your bubble sheet and question booklet as the testing center worker also hands you an MP3 player. As you enter the testing room, tension fills the air. Hundreds of students around you are taking tests, scratching their heads in a desperate last-minute plea to pull off whatever grade they’re shooting for.

You take a seat. To your right is a girl trying to define some sort of chemical bond structure. To your left, a guy sweating and desperately punching numbers into a calculator to solve some sort of physics question. Ahead of you, a small freshman apparently trying to remember exactly which state nullified the tariff of 1833. These are not happy faces. These are faces of determination, desperation, concentration. Complex problems need to be solved; complex formulas need to be applied; obscure facts need to be remembered. Some of this strikes you as you take your seat, hoping beyond hope that you’ll be able to do as well these uber-serious fellow students of yours.

As you plug in your headphones you take special notice of the silence that permeates the air. Aside from pencil scratchings, calculator-button-pushing, and an occasional cough, the room is dead silent. Some of these students have already been here for an hour or more, some of them will still be here for another two hours. Sweating, writing, praying, all in dead silence.

But then your switch on the MP3 player.

BOOM, BABY!

Suddenly filled with energy, you note that the entire testing center atmosphere seems to have lost all of its anxiety. The test isn’t just surmountable, it’s now AWESOME!

What is the name of this piece? “Time Check!” BOOM!

Who was the bandleader? Buddy Rich! BOO-YAH!

When was this piece recorded? 1973, y’all!

The guy on your left is still frantically pushing buttons. A student takes a seat behind you, fully prepared to spend the next three hours writing a long-involved essay about human rights in South Africa. Meanwhile, you turn to the next example in your test!

When was this piece recorded? 1977! Aw, yeah!

What important jazz genre does it exemplify? It’s fusion, b**tches! (justified by the album that launched the fusion movement)

Who wrote it? Joe Zawinul! He was Austrian, but that’s not part of the question! DIG IT!

The next few examples fly by as you get more into it! John Coltrane! Chick Corea! Ornette Coleman! Modal improvisation! Postbop pentatonic solo techniques! And, of course, MILES DAVIS?!? Each answer seems to flow right out of you, doing these pieces justice. You’re excited! You’re pumped! You’re going to pass this test, and you’re gonna do it in style!

Finally, the last example plays, you answer the last question, and you turn the MP3 player off. The girl on your right is still drawing molecular bond diagrams, the student behind you has barely started the first paragraph of an essay, and the guy on your left is still working that calculator. Each of them are furiously working, filled with anxiety and stress. They have to solve complex, impersonal problems while in the hated testing center. But you got to listen to Buddy Rich!

Suck on that, business majors!

52 Weeks – Week 10 – Prologue/Overture

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music, presented in three forms:

“Prologue/Overture” from Travels

CD Version

Live Version

MIDI Version

(For those not familiar with Travels, this may help.)

To quote from my Travels memoirs: “This was the first attempt at orchestration for the show. It was started mid-December of 1999 at Nate’s house when we were still trying to figure out how to work the whole process. This was even before it was decided that I do the orchestrations. It was mostly finished in December but touch-ups and other work were applied later before I printed it.”

And also from the overview in that same document: “When I first really started helping Nate in December of 1999 during my senior year of high school it was because I knew a lot more about Finale than he did. It had been decided for a while that I was to direct the pit orchestra, but the decision of who was doing the orchestrations wasn’t made until near the end of December. We had finally finished the first piano reduction for 1. Prologue/Overture at Nate’s house when I started playing with the orchestra parts to it. I asked Nate if I could also orchestrate the rest of the show, and he said something like, ‘Sure, whatever.’ Little did I know what I was getting myself into.”

Ah, the beginning of Travels. As was noted above, this piece I orchestrated at Nate’s house while he was still trying to figure out Finale. I’m not even sure that we had a firm instrumentation down at that point (for example, I wrote a guitar part for it before it became clear that we weren’t going to end up having a guitar player for the show).

Being the prologue, this piece was special for a number of reasons: it laid out the basic tenets of the plot, those being that the entire show was a flashback of Marco’s travels, that something horrible happened to Marco personally that he didn’t want recorded, and that now he’s been put in jail somewhere with a writer named Rustichello who’s writing everything down. Also this is one of only three pieces that has spoken dialogue in the entire show. In fact, according to Nate, all the spoken dialogue in the prologue comes directly from the actual book of Marco Polo’s travels itself. There’s not much to say about the music itself. It’s given a sort of regal, even martial feel with the staccato horns, snare drum, and steady beat, with a B section taken from a later piece in the show (“12. In These Mountain Tops”).

The overture is just a paraphrase of the main theme of the show (“6. Travels”) with a harp arpeggio at the end seguing into the second piece (“2. Day After Day”). This theme plays at various time skips or commencements during the show: here, when the show flashes back; during song #6, when Marco actually begins his travels; at the end of the first act, when Marco decides to change things (and we move to several months later when act 2 starts); at the end of the escape song before we return to the “present” Marco in jail, and finally to close out the entire show. That’s a lot of ground to cover for one theme. I’ll speak more about it if/when I talk about the song “Travels” itself.

Also one random note: this song let my brother Ben answer a Final Jeopardy! answer about a famous explorer who dictated his story to a prisoner in 1298. Ben was just playing along at home, but still, it was pretty neat.

Coming up next week: Mvmt. 2 of “Mixed Quintet? You Bet!” entitled “Endurance”!

52 Weeks – Week 9 – New

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is:

New

As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a lot of songs for SaXon Geat. During high school it was the instrumentation I used for virtually every song I wrote before Travels. This particular one, while not one we ever performed , rehearsed, or even gave an official name to, is still one of my favorites. I’m not quite sure why, but I think it has a bit of that “factor X,” which I believe is related to the major 7th chord in the first measure of the main theme. In any case, it feels like it’s got a bit more feeling behind it than some of the other stuff I wrote around the same time.

At first I wrote up to 1:12, and then let it sit for a while. When I came back to it I ended stealing the melody of the bridge from the ending credits theme to Chrono Trigger: “To Far Away Times,” which is still one of the most sublime pieces of music I’ve ever heard, despite its SNES 16-bit sound-chip origin. Then I closed it up repeating the main theme.

I remember playing this for Nate back in the day, and he liked it so much he ended up incorporating the short line played at 0:54 into Travels, during the song “No Better Timing.” Oddly enough, “No Better Timing” was the one song I never even tried to orchestrate (well, besides “The Parade,” but Nate never even wrote that one down), but even so I suppose I had a little influence on it, which means I had a hand in every single song in that show, except “The Parade.” Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Coming up next week: the “Prologue/Overture” to Travels!

52 Weeks – Week 8 – Dun dun dun!

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is:

Dun dun dun!

A funny thing happened after high school. During most of my high school career I had written for two basic formats: SaXon Geat, and Travels. Consequently, I had a good amount of experience writing for both a pit orchestra and a ska band minus guitar (yeah, yeah, I know). Now, all of the SaXon Geat stuff I’d done hadn’t been under a deadline or under any pressure or even really for a client (since none of my songs actually got performed by the band anyway). However, both Travels and the stuff I wrote for assignments during my first year of college were obviously under more constraints, both in terms of creativity and time. So somehow, whenever I wrote anything that wasn’t for a specific purpose (to blow off steam, to explore musical ideas, etc.) I defaulted to writing another SaXon Geat-type song, i.e. writing for a rhythm section (bass, drums, keyboard), and a brass section (trumpet, trombone, tenor and alto sax), even though the band itself had long since been disbanded.

“Dun dun dun!” was one such piece. It never really had an official title, and was just something I wrote for no particular reason during the summer of 2001. While not a particularly inspired piece, it still possessed a fair amount of energy driving it, even in this early MIDI incarnation. The bass was a better sample than usual, it had a synth lead, and some strings were used for a pad (which is something I actually do a lot, I’ve noticed; even in my most recent work.) The sounds had a certain fluidity that built upon each other and created a smooth, driving, groove experience. All except the brass sounds. Since I still always wrote a part for the brass, we’ve got one here, accenting the off-beats of beats three and four. However, since the brass sounds I had at the time were atrocious, they seem to interrupt the flow the music is trying to create rather than add to it. The result is a potentially awesome sound ruined by this “eeh-eeh” every measure. Hopefully, I learned my lesson. If memory serves, this was the very last piece I wrote with that instrumentation thrown in there as a throwback to SaXon Geat days. All the songs I’ve written since then that have a brass section have had one because I wanted that type of sound in the piece, not simply because they were there by default, and I think it’s improved my compositional techniques.

The piece is still fun to listen to, despite the horrible brass sounds (and the fact that it’s basically just a 50-second loop).

Coming up next week: “New,” yet another untitled SaXon Geat-esque work!

52 Weeks – Week 7 – Phrustration

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is:

Phrustration!

Of all the more “serious” pieces I’ve written, this is definitely one of my top three or so. “Phrustration” was originally written for my final project in a music theory class, proving that I could write a modal piece: in this case, the Phrygian mode. It was just a piano piece, with a person saying, “Frustration!” every so often and screaming and breaking glass near the end. Phrygian mode + Frustration = Phrustration! I originally planned to do it with Casey coming in and breaking a bottle, but he bailed on me literally in the last minute, causing me to grab some random girl from the class to do it instead (with no bottle break), which didn’t work nearly as well, but whatever; I passed the class.

A year and a half or so later, I brought this piece back and orchestrated it to present at my junior recital. It was the first real project I worked on using Logic Pro, the program I’ve used nearly exclusively since then. For the recital I once again brought Casey back (this time he showed up, too!), and we worked out a whole routine where he was sitting at home trying to do homework or something, but increasingly frustrating things started happening: he broke his pencil, he spilled his drink all over his homework, he couldn’t find anything to watch on TV, he got his foot stuck in the wastebasket, he asked a girl out on the phone only to find out she got married, etc. etc. Near the end he was supposed to smash a picture frame against the desk and scream. Now, I had dubbed in the glass breaking sound on the track and taken out the glass from the frame to make sure Casey didn’t injure anything in the auditorium. However, he replaced the glass before the number and actually smashed it against the desk sending glass flying everywhere. Now, keep in mind that this was in the Maeser building on BYU campus, and the first row of audience members is maybe three feet away. Luckily nobody was hurt, but it kind of brought everyone out of the moment when suddenly they have to fear for their safety. And for the rest of the night Casey was trying to clean it up while I continued with the recital. So, in short, both times I’ve performed this in front of an audience it really has been frustrating.

In any case, I love the Phrygian mode. It’s extremely dark, the second darkest of all the church modes, but it’s not so dark as to lose a sense of finality, as the darkest mode, the Locrian, does. The Locrian mode may imply a sense of loss, spiraling into madness and uncertainty, a despair so deep that it is not understandable. The Phrygian, in contrast, portrays the same level of despair, but without any of the madness. It is a final hopeless loss, one that can be understood but from which there is no escape. The lowered second (which is the difference between the Phrygian mode and the plain ol’ minor key)is what really drives the despair home. In a minor key there can be victory: a villainous victory, but a victory nonetheless. But in the Phrygian mode there can be no victory, not for the protagonist anyway. The opposing forces have overcome him, and he is aware of it all, but unable to surmount any of it. In a way that makes this piece and the one I just wrote last week sort of companion pieces if you will. In this one he is driven to the depths, but in the other he finds redemption and can soar once again.

It was also with this piece that I learned a lot of tricks I hadn’t quite been able to master to make my pieces sound more realistic, especially with the cymbal rolls, orchestral swells, glockenspiel, and harp glissandos. I’m still working on the brass, but I think the rest of it sounds real enough that people don’t automatically say, “That sounds like a video game!”

Interestingly enough, this piece was featured on my last 52 weeks project as well (the one that only lasted four weeks).

Coming up next week: “Dun dun dun!” (And no, that’s not just a dramatic introduction of next week’s piece; it’s the actual name.)

Into the ether

All right, I’m sick of this. I’ve been doing these “52 weeks” posts for, what, seven weeks now, and not a single comment. Not. One. I already know these songs, people! I’m not doing this for myself! I want to get feedback! But since nobody’s said a word, I’m going to assume that either 1) people have stopped reading this blog, and it’s like the old Angelfire days again, where I can post personal things without fear of repercussion, or 2) nobody besides myself actually cares about my music. And I don’t mean in the “I care about you, Jeff, so I care about the things that you do” way, but in the “I am actively involved in the consumption of the product you produce” way. You see the difference? One shows a love (or obligation) toward the person, one shows an acceptance of the music itself. And only the second one will help me believe that I can make a living doing this. Since I’ve gotten no feedback, though, I guess I can’t. Because nobody cares about it. Let me reiterate: I’m not saying nobody cares about me, but that nobody cares about my music. At least not enough to add one little comment in nearly two months’ worth of posts on the subject, which, let’s face it, takes a minimal amount of effort.

This especially hurt with the piece I posted last Tuesday. I may not have entirely conveyed it, but that piece was my favorite I’ve done all year, and a true expression of the essence of what I’m trying to convey to the world through my music. Well, if the world doesn’t give a damn about the song that best expresses who I am, what does that say about me? If the song that means the most to me doesn’t even arouse a single person to make the smallest of comments, even when I post it on my Facebook page too, then what the hell am I doing here? Obviously I’m incapable of touching the chords of other people’s hearts, no matter how hard I try. And that’s the reason I got into music in the first place. And that just reiterates a point I’ve tried to make several times, with varying amounts of success: that I’m a different breed of person, and so hard to understand sometimes that most people have just given up trying, which is a major factor why I’m 27 and still single and haven’t been able to hold onto a girlfriend for more than a month.

Now, I fully expect to get a few, “No, it’s OK, Jeff, I still think you’re awesome” comments on this post. If I’m lucky a few of you may go back to those earlier posts and comment “Sounds good!” But I don’t need anyone’s pity. I don’t need this to be like when I was in elementary school with no friends and one day I burst into tears in front of the whole class and during the next recess a few people thought it was their duty to be nice to me, a duty which, once fulfilled for a recess, left me in the same place: friendless. If you’re not going to be sincere, I don’t need it. All the “You’re a good guy” comments would seem hollow. Actions speak louder than words. But if you are going to be sincere; if you are willing to take the time to listen to what I’ve got to say through what I write, and most importantly, stick with it because you like the music (or alternatively, you don’t like it and are willing to tell me why, which would be even more important), then I’ll keep making those posts. Otherwise I’m done posting music here. This blog will just become somewhere that I post funny Youtube videos once every six months or so. But that’s OK; it won’t be a big loss. One can’t disappoint an audience that doesn’t exist. (And hey, if the reason I’ve got no comments is actually that nobody’s reading this blog anymore anyway, then nobody will read this rant and nobody will feel guilty! It’s a win-win!)

Factor X

For years I’ve been looking for the “it” factor when it comes to music. The one unidentifiable attribute that separates music that I fall in love with from music that I like. That separates the music with a good beat, catchy lyrics (if it’s a song), interesting orchestration, or whatever, from music in which you can take solace and forget yourself. Music you can wrap up in, like a blanket on a snowy night, and just let flow through you.

Several attributes have sprung to mind at different times. Some I’ve outlined in earlier posts. Whatever it is, I still haven’t been able to codify it yet. I’ve got a “Contemplative” playlist, consisting of nearly 1,500 songs (out of the 13,729 that I have on my hard drive) that somehow reach my heart in this way, and it’s as diverse of a list of music as you can get, ranging from predictable choices like arranged hymns and “The Luckiest” by Ben Folds, to less predictable, but understandable (if you know me), choices, like remixes of tunes from Chrono Trigger or the theme from Superman, to completely random picks like Weird Al’s “Hardware Store” or Homestar Runner singing “Todaybor Day is Labor Day.” All of these songs, to varying degrees, possess this “Factor X.”

I’ve tried to emulate it in certain songs I’ve written. Some of them I’ve tried and tried but they never quite clicked (such as “House of Saints” or “Cavernous Triumph”), others I’ve gotten pretty close (like “Lightning” or “Phrustration”), but even those two aren’t quite there yet (“Lightning” gets awfully busy at times, while “Phrustration” is too much of a downer).

Speaking of feeling down, I’ve been rather depressed lately for various reasons, the biggest being yet another birthday spent as an undergrad, so yesterday I took an afternoon off and poured out my soul in the best way I know how: into music. Spending an afternoon and a good chunk of the evening working on this resulted in the closest I’ve ever gotten to encapsulating perfectly that “Factor X.” And so, in lieu of a “52 Weeks” post this week, I’d like to share it with you. I don’t have lyrics for it yet, but I may never have lyrics for it. I’ll leave the interpretation of the music up to the listener, where it’s sure to be more personally affecting.

Here it is.

What do you think? Does it possess that factor for you?

52 Weeks – Week 6 – Ode to Spot

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is:

Ode to Spot

Felis Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature.
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
contribute to your hunting skills, and natural defenses.
I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
a singular development of cat communications
that obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
for a rhythmic stroking of your fur, to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
you would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aide in locomotion,
it often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Written by Data for his pet cat Spot (actually written by Brannon Braga for the ST:TNG episode “Schisms”), the Ode to Spot is one of the more memorable little pieces of Star Trek that fans enjoy. To quote the whole thing is a true sign of Trekkieness. But to set the whole thing to music — well! It just needed to happen! So, for my junior recital, I did just that, and sang it with three myselves (if that’s a word) three times. How, you may ask? Let this recording from my actual junior recital tell you (part 1/part 2).

Jaff, Joff, and Juff were drawings of myself on the chalkboard made by Johnathan Whiting, and at the end I erased their mouths, so that no more villainous characters could make me sing it again. This was one of the funnest parts of my recital, and although the song itself is nothing groundbreaking, it’s still a fun little tune set to a very memorable set of lyrics (memorable not in anybody’s ability to actually remember the words, but just remember that they heard something so ludicrous). This was also before I learned how to pronounce “hedonistic,” apparently.

Coming up next week: Phrustration!

The Worf Effect

And now for something completely different: Worf getting beat up. A lot.

52 Weeks – Week 5 – I’ve Got Rhythm

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is:

I’ve Got Rhythm

Pimp Lando is a series made by Casey Wayman, Billy Grant, and myself from 1998 until, well, we’re still going on it (we’re working on the tenth later this month). The seventh installment was made shortly after our respective missions, about four years after the sixth was finished, so we knew we needed to pick up the series with a bang. So we decided to make it a musical! Instead of writing original songs, however, we just rewrote lyrics from songs from famous musicals, particularly The Phantom of the Opera. This particular ditty closes out the show, where the story’s been wrapped up, Lando’s got the girl (who he loses in the epilogue), and everyone joins in a song-and-dance number. It makes a bit more sense after viewing the episode in its entirety, but not much.

I’m working on fixing Pimp Lando 7 in order to upload a video of the whole thing (there are a lot of timing issues to fix), but for now, I’ve at least got a video of this song up:

Coming up next week: Ode to Spot!

(Oddly enough, flickr gave me no response to the search term “Pimp Lando Rhythm” so I just got a screenshot from the episode.)

Seeeeecret Theeeeeeme Song!

So here’s something fun for you. Recently I was commissioned by a friend to write a theme song for a video he’s working on. I can’t reveal the name or subject matter of the video, however, so I issue you this challenge, dear blog reader: for what type of show would this theme be written? What would it be called? What would be the subject matter? Who would it star? And would it be on Fox?

Note: the theme goes for only about 17 seconds, and the rest of it is just to fade out whenever (probably after the credits).

52 Weeks – Week 4 – Who is this Stranger?

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music, presented in three forms:

“Who is this Stranger?” from Travels!

• CD Version

• Live Version

• MIDI Minus Track Version

(For those not familiar with Travels, this may help.)

I’m going to present all Travels songs in these three formats, as the differences can be striking and interesting. For example, with “Who is this Stranger?” the MIDI version has a lot more energy than the CD and live version, due to a faster tempo and a screwed-up keyboard in the other two (it was supposed to be a square wave, but due to some miscommunication it ended up being a Hammond organ, and the two sound nothing alike).

To quote from my Travels memoirs: “This is where the musical style of the show shifts from an old-fashioned musical to a rock opera. The energy level is high as the show gets rockin’. This is heightened in the MIDI file by the Square sound (the techno video-game sound) and on the tape by the slap bass line. Easily one of the songs that lost a bit on the CD, it still is a great entrance into China.”

“Who is this Stranger?” is one of the first songs I completed while orchestrating Travels, and I was really excited about the energy put into it. As time went on during the orchestration and rehearsal process, I discovered that what I put in the MIDI file and what the orchestra was capable of playing were often quite different, both in terms of skill level and just being real instruments, and as a result the CD suffers. The live version is a little more energetic, since the drums and bass were both killed on the CD.

“Who is this Stranger?” was also one of the only songs Nate asked for my lyrical help on. I think after I gave helpful suggestions like “I’ve never seen their kind or like, I kind of like their look, but look, they look just like Al Gore” and Annelise’s favorite, “Who are these strangers, strangers from Granger,” Nate turned elsewhere for lyrical help (although, in my defense, lines like “You will see it all as we push off my favorite pier/You’re gonna push your friend in the water?” stayed in the show).

Finally, the song should have been titled “Who are these Strangers?” since that’s what is actually sung, but oh well, whaddya gonna do?

Coming up next week: “I’ve Got Rhythm” from Pimp Lando 7!

52 Weeks – Week 3 – Decision

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music: Mvmt. 1 of “Mixed Quintet? You Bet!” entitled

Decision!

The whole five-part quintet thing was composed as part of my Music 288 class (Composition 2) back in 2001, when I was still a music composition pre-major before I decided to jump ship and move to the media music department. Each assignment that semester was to write a piece for the same group of five instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and randomly, euphonium. Then we had what was termed a “real studio experience” where we’d go to Studio Y on campus and give our music to the players, where they would sight-read it and it would get recorded. We weren’t allowed to talk to them about performance notes or anything; we had to stay sequestered in the booth, so the performance was based strictly on whatever we had written on the score and parts.

This particular assignment was the first of five, and sadly, it was also the only one that I can’t remember now what the exact assignment was. It sounds ternary with repeating motives, so the assignment probably had something to do with that. Sadly, on this recording, the flute player didn’t show up for some reason, so the guy playing the flute was just one of the students in the composition class who played flute for a year or so in junior high, which is why the last note is kind of strained and stuff. Still, it’s kind of fun, and it’s one of the few pieces I have a live recording of, so that makes it special.

Coming up next week: “Who is this Stranger?” from Travels!

52 Weeks – Week 2 – Crystal

Explanation of the 52 Weeks Project

Today’s piece of music is…

Crystal!

This short MP3 is less a song and more an awakening of possibility. It was made when I was experimenting with sounds while I was trying to write some music for a Rescue Ranger RPG that an online friend was making. I did several songs for it, even though it never got made. This particular one was made when I was trying to make some sort of ambient sounds, and for some reason it spoke to me, so I decided to save it. It’s short, peaceful, and you can do a very quick Tai Chi move to it or something. It’s called “Crystal” because that was the image I got when I wrote it. That’s about all I got on this one.

Coming up next week: Mvmt. 1 of “Mixed Quintet? You Bet!” entitled “Decision”!

52 Weeks…again! Week 1 – Presidential Clown

Longtime blogketeers may remember my old 52 Weeks of Music project that fizzled out after about week four or so. Well, I’m going to try to do a similar project again. This time, however, instead of doing 52 weeks of new music, every week I’m going to highlight a piece of music I’ve written (or orchestrated). I’m throwing basically everything I have on my hard drive into a playlist, and once a week I will randomly pick one and write a bit of background info about it, how I feel about it, and provide a link to listen to it. A lot of the music may already be featured on my music page, but I’ve written a lot that I haven’t uploaded there, so you will find some new stuff cropping up as well (such as other songs from Travels or what have you).

I also invite anyone reading to offer comments. I know nearly all of my past requests for comments on my music have fallen on deaf ears (no pun intended), but I hope that maybe if I do this every week I can get some feedback eventually. I don’t need detailed critiques; even simple comments from untrained people would be nice!

And, just for fun, I will also put the name of the song into flickr and whatever the first picture that comes up is, that will be the pic in the post!

So, with no further ado, let’s load up the ol’ random playlist and see what we come up with!

Today’s piece of music is. . .

Presidential Clown!

The year was 1996. My brother Ben had just formed his first band, then known as Fried Green Friends of the Llama, which later changed names to Giardia. It was just him and his friend from Granite Youth, who was also a bass player, but they still needed some music to play. So Ben approached my thirteen-year-old self with a request: write us a rock song! Up to this point I had never written any sort of rock song, so it was a whole new thing for me. I started with bass, lead guitar, and vocal parts, and plunked something out, quite unaware that my guitar part didn’t in any way match how a real guitar would play, but whatever. Also, I knew nothing about how to write drum parts, so I just used the default “rock drums” setting on the Roland keyboard we had and put it in. Then Ben wrote lyrics to it that don’t make too much sense. He was just about to turn sixteen and I guess wanted to write some sort of “socially relevant” thing, but include references to two things he obsessed over in ninth grade for some reason: SPAM and the Beatles (“the kings” in the song), even though neither had to do with the subject matter.

The song never got performed by Giardia, as that band never really got past the “wouldn’t it be cool if we had a band” stage. It was a seminal work of mine, though, laying the groundwork for a lot of the work I’d later do in SaXon Geat and even into this decade. This recording was made almost twelve years later, in preparation for my junior recital, with added brass and flute parts, as well as a redone guitar part that actually sounded like a guitar. For anyone curious, the original sounded like this.

Well, that does it for week 1 of 52 weeks! Coming up next week…”Crystal”!

Musical insight?!?

So I took an hour during lunch last week to write a new piece of music, just to see what I could do in an hour, much like I’ve done before, but this time using the better BYU equipment, and this is what I came up with. I also thought I’d describe the process, which I’ve used on a lot of the stuff I’ve written. The approach is mostly organic and less planned than one may expect, and I’ve learned to write stuff with more of a structure to begin, but this is still fun to do on occasion.

As I sat down I had some song with an accordion running through my head (I don’t remember what song now, but it was most likely a They Might Be Giants affair), so I decided to start with an accordion and do an Old World-type melody. To make it even more Old World-like, I put it into 3/4 time and played a 16-bar melody. Normally when I’ve done this in the past it meanders all over the place, but since I’ve received some training the first and the last phrase are similar. Then, on a separate accordion track I laid down the chords. These are also just played out as I go, which means that, although mostly they line up, sometimes the harmonies between the chords are quite jarring, and, indeed, a lot of the work I do on pieces is cleaning up the dissonances after I’ve recorded the lines.

So after I clean up the accordion chords, I repeat (read: copy and paste) the last two phrases to give it a sort of rounded binary feel (aababa, although it was really more abcaca). To change it up, I create a flute track doubling the melody to add a bit of color, and although it’s barely noticeable on the track, it is there. The rounded binary form gets me thinking about my Baroque music classes, and how most often the keyboard music from the Baroque was harpsichord-based and I’d never really written for harpsichord before, so I copied the main 16-bar melody into a harpsichord part to have something to work with. Normally I probably would have rerecorded the melody so it would have some ornamental differences, but I only had an hour. Then I recorded some arpeggiated chords into the left hand of the harpsichord and cleaned them up. Since I played them in without planning them out, some of the chord progression turned out differently with the harpsichord than it had previously with the accordion. (You can tell most easily at the beginning: where the accordion starts on the submediant (F major), the harpsichord starts straight on the tonic (A minor)).

At this point the whole thing has a very nice, old-fashioned feel to it. Now, while sometimes I program in my own drums, more often I take a pre-existing loop and edit it to fit my needs. And since I only had an hour, I decided to find a nice, 3/4, waltzy sort of percussion track to accompany what I already had down. Oddly, searching the library that came on the computer, however, didn’t turn up any waltz beats. In fact, most of the 3/4 stuff was actually rock/jazz beats. So, instead of taking the time to write my own waltz track, which I might have done given more time, I just dropped in the “Alternative 3/4 Beat” into a drum track. This, of course, changed the entire tenor of the piece and gave it a funk it didn’t have previously. And of course, a funky drum beat needed a funky bassline, so I added a fingered electric bass part, playing whole notes during the accordion section and a faster, funkier line during the harpsichord section. This was done because I wanted to emphasize the melody still during the accordion part, but since there was nothing new melodically during the harpsichord part the bass could take some more of the focus. In fact, a little later I decided to add the drums only after the entire 16-bar melody had played once, to both draw more attention to the melody and add a bit of a fun surprise when the incongruous drum track came in, a surprise emphasized by the funky bassline that plays during the second part.

So now I wanted to add some more texture to the second section, during the last 12 bars. Since I had added drums and a bass, the next logical step was to add a guitar. This I spent nearly fifteen to twenty precious minutes on, but it never quite gelled. It just seemed too busy with a guitar playing chords, especially since it was the same register as the harpsichord arpeggios. Conversely,  a guitar playing a contrapuntal line diddn’t work with such a funky bassline; however Baroque that might be, it was just too much to have three completely separate moving lines. SO in the end the guitar part got axed.

But what to do now? The second section still needed some more texture, and I only had about ten minutes or less left before I had to leave the lab and go to work, so what could I do? Well, the answer came in the form of a quick-and-dirty solution: take the accordion chords from the last 12 bars of the melody, and put them into a string part, one octave higher. The slow-moving chords would provide some nice color and a contrast to the fast-moving bassline. At the last second before I bounced the song to an MP3, I decided it needed even a bit more and ended up doubling the bass in a piano part, also an octave up. Sadly, I couldn’t fix the dissonances between the bass/harpsichord and the string part, which is why it sounds a bit jarring on a few beats in the second section.

Had I more time I would have fixed those, and probably done more with the piano part, probably changing the pitches to be more harmonious as opposed to just straight copies of the bass notes, albeit with the same rhythms to avoid the busy-ness problems I was having with the axed guitar part. Since the piece had already a nice AA beginning in the large-form arena, I would probably have gone on to write a contrasting B section, and then brought back the A at the end, giving it an AABA song form, Or maybe I would have gone more complicated; who knows?

In any case, this is what I could do in an hour of composing time, starting from scratch. I hope this provides some insight on how I write music.

Ron and Jacob have a dance-off!

In the upcoming Poison Ivy Mysteries show, Twilit: The Full-Blooded Princess, the characters of Ron from Harry Potter and Jacob from Twilight have a dance-off for some reason. It’s the only piece of music I’m writing for the show, as Nate Drew is doing all the rest. Jacob is dancing to some sort of tribal-sounding theme, while Ron’s all about the white hip hop. This is only a first draft; it will hopefully be much better in terms of samples, mixing, and dynamics when it’s all done (at which point I’ll also post it to my music page), but let me know what you think!

Dance-off!

Unnecessary notification

I don’t know exactly why, but I found this one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while when I logged on to Facebook today:

Thanks, random Facebook application, for demonstrating your complete inability to do anything useful and then telling me about it!

Music Page now operational!

After who knows how long, I have finally updated the music page on this blog, and wow, is it an update! I’ve got several songs from every year basically since I started writing songs up to the present; overall, around 75 songs are listed there now. Please go check them out, and give feedback!

Myers-Briggs Personality Test

Took two different versions of this test, with two interesting outcomes. One said I was ISTP (Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perception), while the other said I was ISFP (the same, but Feeling instead of Thinking), but only with a slight preference for Feeling and a moderate preference for the other traits. According to the Myers-Briggs website, the two types go down like this:

ISTP
Tolerant and flexible, quiet observers until a problem appears, then act quickly to find workable solutions. Analyze what makes things work and readily get through large amounts of data to isolate the core of practical problems. Interested in cause and effect, organize facts using logical principles, value efficiency.

Famous ISTP:

Michael Jordan

ISFP
Quiet, friendly, sensitive, and kind. Enjoy the present moment, what’s going on around them. Like to have their own space and to work within their own time frame. Loyal and committed to their values and to people who are important to them. Dislike disagreements and conflicts, do not force their opinions or values on others.

Famous ISFP:

Frederic Chopin

And hey, I’m actually both of these, depending on the situation and what mood I’m in. I’d analyze this further, but right now I’m in more of an ISFP mood, and don’t want to force my opinions or values on others. Maybe later I’ll be in an ISTP mood and will analyze what makes this work and readily get through large amounts of data to isolate the core of the practical problem. You know, I’ll be interested in cause and effect, yadda yadda yadda. Also, I want to go to bed.

EDIT: According to another website, an ISTP is known as “The Mechanic,” while the ISFP is known as “The Artist.” Fitting since my strengths lie in tech theatre and computer-assisted music composition. One thing’s for sure: I’m definitely an introvert, as evidenced by all these blog posts trying to figure out who I am and what my role is in life.