Thursday:
Ear Training:
Last time we talked about ear training, I mentioned how 'not exciting it is'. That remains true. However I did well enough on my entrance exam that I do not have to attend class as long as I can pass the final. I therefore plan on attending each day, I can use the practice. Ear training is actually quite important, it's how Mozart wrote, his ear was so well trained he could simply write down what he heard in his head. Of course, he was an anomaly.
Some modern composers can write purely from ear, many train forever to fine tune their ear, while still others rely on the piano or other instrument to verify what they hear in their head is in fact what they think it is. Beethoven was well know for banging the shit out of his piano while writing, trying to get it perfect. It worked, that guy was a machine. Glen Frey claims he learned to write songs by listening to his downstairs neighbor, Jackson Browne, make tea and bang out 'Doctor My Eyes' on his piano for hours.
I feel like I have a decent ear. I can hear chord progressions pretty easily, it's what makes it easy for me to hear a song once and be able to play it back on Ruby (my keyboard, yes, it's a personal relationship many musicians have, BB King had Lucile. I don't consider her an instrument so much as I do a collaborator, I can do what I do because she is who she is.) I may not get it note for note, but I can fake it well enough you know what song it is and somebody can sing along with it.
I do alright with melodic dictation, if I hear a melody I can write it down, provided it's not some crazy chromatic thing or a 12-tone row. Hey, a man has his limits. I get better through practice which is why I attend a class I basically 'CLEPed' out of.
Conducting:
Conducting can be a power trip, many conductors are known as being assholes because of their power complex when working with an ensemble. I can see how that happens if you're not conscious of it all the time. When I was in college, I was the doorman for the Broadway Theater in SLC. I found it an exercise in human behavior to see how people bowed to perceived authority. "I'm sorry, but you have to wait behind the rope before I can let you into the theater." And they'd do it, without question. They stayed within the velvet boundary until I lifted the rope. That was a power trip.
Conducting an ensemble, if done correctly, is more symbiotic in nature. It's give and take, you ask the ensemble to do something, and they respond. You respond to their response, and they do back, and so on until the piece is over. I've heard many people ask, "Why do you need a conductor? Don't they just wave their arms?" Well, yes, they wave their arms. What you don't see if you're in the audience is the conductor's facial expressions, the nuance of the 'arm waving'. You don't feel the way the music affects your neighbor and how you respond to that, and how they respond to you, and how the conductor responds to the ensemble, and how the ensemble responds to that, et cetera.
This week, we were introduced by the instructor to a YouTube video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Haydn's 88th Symphony. Bernstein is widely regarded as one of, if not the best conductor ever. There is room for debate on that topic but I will not debate it here. Watch this 4-minute clip of him conducting, he doesn't move his arms at all, he influences the musicians solely though facial expressions.
Some of you may say, "That's a parlor trick, he's not really affecting the way they play." Those of you who have played in a performance ensemble will know that is no joke. He is relaying important information by using nothing more than his head. It's entirely possible for a group of professional musicians to play Sousa's 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' without a conductor. You would never get any group through Beethoven's '9th Symphony' without one.
Finale:
'Finale OG'. That's what they called me when they learned that I have been using this notation software since version 1 came out in 1988. With the exception of the founder and 2 instructors, nobody else associated with my program was even born yet. I remember purchasing it when it came out, it came on floppies, 2 3 1/5 inch floppies to be exact. My street cred shot through the roof because I actually worked with floppies back in the 'day' as they say.
Back in the dark ages of music notation software, you needed a special interface to connect the MIDI style connectors from the music keyboard, to the weird-ass port on the back of the computer. Fortunately for me, the lovely young lady I was dating at the time, who later became and still is my fabulous wife, worked at a music store and thoughtfully procured me one of these expensive yet necessary devices. Now all you need is a USB cable.
Friday:
Applied Composition & Theory:
In college, everybody thought I was nuts for liking music theory. Most other music majors 'suffered' through it, but I dug it. It's my soul's natural language. Once I had taken all the undergrad theory classes available, I got special permission from the instructor to audit the Master and Doctorate level theory classes. I couldn't get enough, I was insatiable. The Doctorate level class consisted of the instructor, myself, and 2 grad students who were as old as my father. We spent our time doing full-scale harmonic and structural analysis of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas. It's a drug, I'm not kidding! As much as a human being who is not Beethoven can understand about Moonlight Sonata, I understand. I can't find them at the moment, but when I do, I'll post a scan of one of the score pages just to give you an idea of just how out there this shit is.
As far as class today is concerned, I hit a new point, we covered topics that though not entirely new to me, have not been explored much in my years as a composer. Which is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying! The thing to keep in mind is the fundamental difference between 'art music' such as Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Bobby Brown and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. and 'commercial music' such as pretty much everything that has ever been written for a movie, documentary, television show of broadway musical, is that commercial music must be acceptable and friendly to the non-musically literate members of society.
I hope that doesn't come across as condescending, that certainly is not what I intended. With art music, a composer can pretty much do whatever the hell they like, and if the audience doesn't like it, well, they deal with that in their own way. If you want more detail about this topic, research Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' and the affect that piece had when it was premiered. Visual art aficionados in general don't like things they don't understand, they like predictable music in their entertainment. As a budding media composer, my job is to write exactly the music the director wants (or in some cases what they think they want).
So the class material I'm talking about is a set of 'suggestions' to follow when you need to create 4 minutes of music before tomorrow morning. Basically a set of harmonic and melodic tools one can use to create appropriate-sounding music for a movie or to show. These 'suggestions' are not in the same vein as topics covered in basic university music theory and composition classes. So yeah, they are new and new things can be scary, however, it is thrilling to be exposed to new ideas and subjects!
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