I wrote this piece with the idiomatic marimba techniques I love. Because the marimba notes decay so quickly, I prefer harmonic progression by suggestion and arpeggiation over insistent, rolled four-note chords. Marimba notes have a characteristic and beautiful attack, so I use uneven groups of repeated notes punctuated by strong accents throughout the piece. Grand, five-octave marimbas—such as the one used in this piece—also have a unique property: the lowest notes produce more than one tone. They sound the fundamental deep pitch, but they also produce a clear tone much higher than the actual pitch of the rosewood bar: this ghost note is called an overtone. With this attribute in mind, I wrote melodies in the middle part of the piece that chain together high pitches with the overtones of the low pitches. This delicate section then gives way to exuberant music, clangorous at the climax, before closing as it began, with the marimba alone.

This excerpt comes from a studio recording made by Sean Statser and the howl (theory).

The threat level is at orange
today; And I have back pains;
And you are a sinner;
And we are going to die soon;
Do not leave your bags.
unrequited love, diminishing prospects, cantankerous
mother, philandering husband, expensive diesel, culture-deep
irascible worry; I am going
to that great big place
in the sky where
the threat level is at green
always; And you can give
your bag to a stranger.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
In other news, the weeks-long sauna adventure begins in my room. Currently—85˚; high tomorrow—93˚. In other words, I move nocturnal. Holla at me at 5AM if you feel like it; I’ll be up.

Got Robertson says don’t see the doctor
Brady James five pray to Pat
Robertson, and all your health
problems be solved. He will be built
Brady James thought
bubbles good dog blue
tooth people read the Bible

___________________________

Lee and I created this while waiting to walk through the fantastical Big Bambú at the Met. I have no idea what we originally said. I think these are lyrics to a Rick James song.

Orchestra mockups underlie a contemporary malaise among professional musicians. And there’s good reason for that: it’s harder for professional musicians to get gigs today—especially in  film, television, and commercial music—because there are fewer recording sessions, and because those Broadway orchestra pits keep shrinking. Composers, directors, and audiences have grown comfortable with sampled instruments, which are often mixed with live instruments to cover their weaknesses. But the composer isn’t all to blame! Composers work with fewer live instruments and more sampled instruments because {α} it’s an option, and {β} it’s a good way to stay in the budget and on schedule. No way does this excuse James Horner’s abominable score for Apocalypto, however.

I sympathize with both constituencies, partially because I’ve always had a split mind about technology. On one level, I can’t get enough. I mean, I’ve learned how to code this website, record music in my room, do lots of audio production,  do graphic design when I feel like it, & make all my own keyboard shortcuts for Sibelius. I bought an iPod in 2003. I dig tech. But sometimes I’m super wary of digital technology. I prefer the directness of physical things: pages, acoustic instruments, face-to-face social interaction, wax cylinders (?). On days when I’m most technophobic, I go into the guest room at the end of the hall, sit at the awesome antique accounting desk, and write music with a ruler and pencil sharpener; or I kayak in the Hudson.

This luddite tendency is probably why I chose to dedicate my artistic energy to live instruments, and my music to paper. It’s therefore important to know that making a good score (which is a set of instructions) and making a good mockup (which is the sound itself) are very different tasks. I haven’t done much in the way of mockups, because I spend most of my time on projects making detailed and clean scores. I have spent very little time and energy mockup-ing my music.

But I had to make one today, and I realized that conductors would have a ball doing this! You get to make tiny adjustments to the placement, length, articulation, and volume of every note. Your musicians are little puppets, and you get to freeze time and command each player to do your exact bidding. It’s possible that doing this could make you a better musician. You can adjust the balances in the orchestra precisely—less 2nd flute, less clarinet, more 3rd horn, slight ritard. before the third beat, & etc. In that way, it’s like running conductor-practice rehearsals with an orchestra. I found, too, that you can learn a lot about style by experimenting with a phrase. If you just cut off a few notes slightly before the beat, the phrase suddenly projects greater clarity. Or use another instrument to articulate a note, and then quiet the inner voices to create a transparent sound in the winds. It makes you feel like Gustav Mahler, whom you can virtually hear yelling at the orchestra just by looking at his scores.

Here is a live orchestra (Boston, I think), playing Swan Lake No.13c, measures 81–100, as well as my mockup of the same passage:

That second clip is my performance. I am the conductor because I made the performance decisions from Tchaikovsky’s score, same as if I had made them in a room of musicians. You’ll notice the sound is tinnier, the violins are maybe a little loud, and that the clarinets are louder on the staccato chords at the end of the passage. However, my winds are more together on those chords, and the violin melody is a little clearer. The point is, orchestra mockups are useful to musicians, too. Furthermore, there are some conductors in the world who should switch careers and start dealing with sampler orchestras. The live players will be thankful.

This piece is about the Cuban, centenarian, ex-slave Esteban Montejo, who lived through every major political change in Cuba in the late-19th and 20th centuries. Eugene Perry, as Esteban, was captivating. He narrated the story, speaking at times, singing at others and speak-singing a lot.

That vocal quality makes some people think it’s not an opera. Henze himself called it a recital for four musicians. Fine. But to my mind, this production counts for a simple reason: the piece is presented as a narrative music-drama, and  the music, not the director, paces the drama. That to me is the major qualifier. For instance, the distinction between book musicals and opera isn’t style. Style is a red herring. The practical difference is in direction: the director just does more for the pacing of a musical than she does for the pacing of an opera.

And it’s not that Eugene didn’t sing in Cimarrón. Esteban’s sung lines were gorgeous, particularly when he sang about loneliness and the kindness of country people. It was especially lovely because he didn’t use his La Scala tone: he made every effort to communicate the words at all times. 10,000 points to Mr. Perry. However, I grew frustrated with the arbitrary-sounding, sprechtstimme-style text setting of parts of the narration, if only because Henze—and the English translator—emphasize the strang-EST syl-a-BOWLS, obscuring the meaning of the words.

And I really wish that Henze would give Esteban actual melodies at certain spots. If I remember right, he obliquely refers in the voice to folk-ish melodies in a bunch of places, but it’s like. Just do it. Give me a real melody in the voice where it’s appropriate, even in this awesome universe of clicky forest spirit sounds. Henze does this more directly in the instrumental music. He covers an enormous range of style in the instrumental music, ingeniously conjuring Cuban, African, and Spanish music through instrumentation and rhythm. Plus, it’s so satisfying when he gives us a moment of a simple flute melody over cycling guitar chords. So I just wanted a more direct reference to folk melody in the voice.

Yes. yes, you did.

The dancers also made direct cultural references, each in their own ways. Oh my gosh I loved the contrast between them. Tall white boy. Man with dreads. Beautiful woman. Adolescent boy. The differences among types and among movement styles were stunning.

However, the best thing about the dancers was the versatility of their roles. I absolutely loved choreographer Zack Winokur’s ability to introduce the dancers as pantomime characters to whom Esteban referred, and then to morph them into abstract, supporting figures as the action moved on. They would assume new characters, allude to earlier characters, all while their movement styles continued to evolve with the story.

Yeah for everybody serving the story! Yeah Zack and Ted! Yeah Andrew, Manelich, Yara, and Jose! Cheers ICE and GMF!

Mobile providers haven’t thought this through. Verizon, AT&T and (God forbid) Apple have setup ringtone creation services by which one can excerpt part of a Glee cast recording track for a ringtone. This is a bad idea simply because phones have tiny little speakers that produce a limited range of frequencies; these songs sound horrible on them! It’s like Taylor Swift turned into a Brooklyn noise producer.

So what are the requirements of a good ringtone? The length’s got to be right: let’s say 7–15 seconds long. And the sounds have to be suited to the speakers of a phone—this is actually a basic orchestration concept. Cellphones produce only a narrow band of frequencies well. Think back to radio orchestras, or Max Steiner scores. Film and radio composers of the 30s adapted their writing for the recording technologies of the time: the strings would be written in four octaves much of the time since the mics would dull the strings. Subtlety in orchestration was pretty much out, in favor of making the orchestra sound as full and crisp as recording technology allowed.

We’ve got to make the same considerations for phones. Here’s one I wrote called Bounce which uses primarily a single octave (plus piano doubling, and a couple chords at the end):

Balance is important, too. When somebody’s hearing this thing in transit, you’ve got telegraph the material. Here’s one where the foreground element is a guitar, mixed way above the other instruments. This was the first one I made for my friend Ike (He didn’t like it because I dropped a beat in the middle).

Sometimes the best ringtone material is very high register. Xylophone attacks, high piano, high synthesizer, etc. having a way of cutting through a lot of noise, or purses, or hipster pants. Here’s the second one I made for Ike, featuring mallet percussion and piano (He liked this one).

You don’t have to sacrifice complexity either. I use this ringtone often because there’s more to hear than just the foreground melody. The mid– and background material consists of revolving, syncopated chords, which continually change position in relation to the melody. It’s simple—only two elements (plus some background percussion)—but it’s enough to keep me from wanting to destroy my phone after hearing it 1,000 times.

After all, material is the primal consideration. It’s got to stand up immediately and be attractive enough to withstand thousands of hearings. A good ringtone theme should be like a shoe that fits the first time you wear it and doesn’t fall apart after a month. Rainbow sandals aren’t good enough; they take too long to break in. This ringtone, MJ, also comprises two main elements, though it’s completely different in tone from Ike No. 2. It’s for Michael and apes several tendencies of his recent style. It’s a little long for a ringtone (0:24) but it’s chill, spacious, and the material deserves the time.

You can also be a masochist and write a ringtone that stabs your ears with fork prongs. Perhaps your composition teacher asked you to do this, for instance, and then attempted to sell it through Schirmer.

Mary Epperson Day in Homer, Alaska

This woman has for many decades been at the center of ‘art-world’ in my hippy-fisherman hometown of Homer, Alaska. She was the first great music teacher in my life, even though I think she should have gotten on me more about rhythm. Here she is looking impossibly adorable:

I can still hear her voice fretting over my decision to fish with my dad. “Oh but Conrad, what about your hands? Some shark may bite your fingers off, and what then?”

————————

A related thought: