a fried hard-drive at the server farm later, and my posts since Nov. 1 are gone. I found the three I’d posted on happy Google-cache, so I’m about to repost them. But the Doctor Atomic discourses are missing, probably for good. I’ll try to get an abbreviated version done soon.

So, lesson: write everything on my own computer. Do not trust the server. Not learned.

your friends’ art.

(Thanks, Seth)

I brought the tentative instrumental opening of the saxophone quartet + electronics that I’m writing to my computer music class on Wednesday. My teacher and my classmate each had a look and both said, this looks a lot like that recorder quartet.

I guess I’m to take this as evidence of a personal style forming? That’s good on its face, as an individual voice is supposedly what we’re all looking for out here in composition land. I hadn’t meant to write another wedge, but as soon as they said it, I realized I had, though this time it moves by skips instead of chromatic steps, and it covers an octave-and-a-half instead of only a perfect fifth, and it’s shorter.

But then I look at that and think, well, I should do something different. At least formally - I’m sick of starting each piece with a bare-bones statement of a small geometrical fragment that “is the root material for the whole work.” No way to get around the first bars being the root material, but in the piece after Omie (that’s what the sax quartet’s called), I’m planning to kind of start with a bang, throw it all out at once and break it down as the piece continues instead of building up.

I guess that’s called “growing,” but as I’m about to post in another ramble, it’s weird to feel the need to rebuild from scratch each time. But I also don’t want to get predictable, I mean, I’m only 30, there’s no reason to start repeating myself yet, and I’ve already written two long pieces based on a wedge shape…

I reacted to Doctor Atomic, which I’m very happy to have seen at the Met, well, a long time ago (Nov. 8, specifically), now, in three main ways, which I’ll explore in the next three posts:

1. As politics
2. As music, with a digression on the nature of genius
3. As theater, or more specifically, as words as they relate to music, plus a conclusion

These will appear soon, I swear! They’re 3/4s written already! [note: given server issues, well, maybe they won’t, or rather, it’ll be shorter]

—

I persistently remember the title of this post as “unfaithful” - Batter my heart, unfaithful God. Or sometimes, it’s “three-fingered.” What does that mean?