Week 1 - Weekend Wakeup Call

 Where did I leave off? Oh yeah! Thursday.

Thursday:

Foundations in Film Scoring:

The basics of film scoring and how it works in hollywood. Members of the filmmaking team, job descriptions, how being a composer relates to the music director and other members of the music team. 

How the role of composer relates to the director and her team, what it's like to have a music spotting session (the production team meets with the music team to map out where there will be music, where there won't, and the emotional context of that music).  This is my favorite class! The teacher is another total child of the 80's and we get along quite well.  He's a huge John Hughes fan as well as the Zemeckis / Silvestri team. 

Conducting: Nothing exciting happened in conducting today. It's not really an exciting topic. 

Friday:

Applied Composition:

This was 4-hours of advanced music theory! OMG, I've died and gone to nirvana! This is probably the most difficult subject for non-musically-literate individuals to grasp.  Engineers talk about how the Heisenberg compensator interacts with the rasamafrat dohickymabob. Artists talk about, well, whatever artists talk about. Composers talk about how using a modaly-constructed diatonic melody over chord changes FMaj7 - D-7- C7 - FMaj7 is functionality related to A-7 - FMaj7 - E-7(b5) - D-7.  

These are my favorite conversations and being in a room with 10 students, a teacher, and the roving director is the best part of the week!

Saturday / Sunday:

Holy shit! 

I forget how much outside-of-class time it takes to be in school. I was never a great student, (Lori can attest to this, ask us about the Clearfield High School - Crown Billiards exchange program) most of the classes I've had since 10th grade are music, I can do those. I never developed time management skills to handle non music classes and homework (even though I did get an online Masters of Science in Instructional Design, that's a blog of its own). 

Sunday night at 6:34 PM and I am finally done with a weeks homework. Noted, that I spent 16 hours this week neither in class nor doing homework; my commute consumed that precious resource like Pavarotti eating a Ballpark Frank. In addition to learning all my music stuff, I am learning how to be a successful student. This is a lot for a 53-year old non-traditional student to deal with. 

This weekend was also a technology weekend. School sends me home with a Mac Mini and an iLok (USB key that holds licenses for multiple music applications such as Finale, Digital Performer, all the software I need for school). I now have my iMac Pro, my school-issued Mac Mini, 2 monitors, 2 keyboards, 2 mice and an 88-key piano at my desk. It took the better part of Saturday to hook all that up.