Musings of a Composer

 One benefit of the pandemic universe we have been living in is how it has brought our lives into focus by the reality of death — and for me, this has led to what I think of as My Legacy Project. What do I need to do to give my music (recordings, compositions) the support & structure they need so that when I’m gone they can continue to have life and provide joy to listeners and players? Kind of like launching children into their lives as adult, how best to do this for my music, but also encompassing how to make it easy for the executor of my estate to manage it all when I’m gone, and also including how can I have the most fun with it all while I’m still here? Tim Reppert has a huge role in this revival of my musical “ambition” — he is such a fan of the music we created together in Water Bear! And his interest in coming to Ithaca (from Boston) to have playing reunions really re-ignited my sense of what might be possible, even though I’ve got finger issues and neck issues that ha...

 One big effort I made to improve The Mountains Swimming 4 horns and piano arrangement, to bring it up to snuff, was to create a section for the horn players to improvise, and another section for the pianist to improvise. For the horns I gave them the easier, more intuitive chord progression section, and divided it up so either Horn 1 or 2 gets to improvise and Horns 3 and 4 are playing backup along with the piano, and vice versa: a section for Horn 3 or 4 to improvise with Horns 1 and 2 doing the backing lines along with the piano.  And the pianist gets the harder chord progression to improvise over, with all 4 horns doing backing lines. I also made it so the improvisation sections can be skipped entirely, and the piece will still make sense. I got a big kick out of doing all of this intricacy like a chess game: if I make this move here in this part, what else needs to change? Does Horn 3 have a chance to breathe if they play this section and then have to play right away in t...

 A couple of weeks ago I played with some new musicians, and one piece we tried together was Joy, which I had notated in 3/4 time. Of course the pianist sight-read it as a waltz, and it was very much the wrong feel! I played for her how jaunty the melody should sound, and she got it — heard that it was almost more in 2 beats per measure rather than 3. She suggested I notate it in 4. I could hardly wrap my mind around that leap, from 3/4 to 4. However, I was also suffering from bad brain fog from the second vaccine (I realized afterwards!). When I was able to focus this morning, I realized that yes I go back and forth every other measure — first measure is in 6/8, next measure is in 3/4, for almost the whole piece! So the lightbulb went off in my head, why not notate it in 12/8? And then do the beaming of the eighth notes in the pattern of 3,3,2,2,2. And once I looked up how to do that in Sibelius I was able to make that transformation, and even find a measure that was very difficul...