Only six blank measures to go in Milky Way!

I’ve smoothed out the rat’s issues and moved into and through the final stanza, and even into the coda, which is just a repeat of mm. 68-69. Since the next two measures are just a repeat of those measures, transposed up a sixth, I should be able to finish this piece on Sunday morning.

I’ve developed this sense of completion, of being finished in some way, which is stupid, since although Milky Way is the last piece I composed (always excepting the Epilogue), I still have Marmalade Man, Make Way, and Tale of the Tailor to orchestrate. I have a long way to go before I sleep!

Still, I don’t expect any of them to have the issues that Milky Way has presented. They are pretty straightforward, without the shifting moods of this piece. They also don’t present issues of delicacy, transparency, grandeur, profundity, etc., that a walk across the night sky might.

By the way, anyone who is interested in hearing A Visit to William Blake’s Inn played through in its entirety is invited to come to the Newnan School of Dance on Wednesday, January 10, at 7:00. For full details, see the Lacuna Group.

early morning: Many days when I report that I’ve done “nothing,” I’ve actually done quite a bit of work in my head, going over sections of William Blake that need work, listening to the CD in the car and making decisions about instrumentation or effects or stuff (that’s a technical term.)

Thus it was this morning that as I was finishing my toilette I decided that maybe the section in question in Milky Way needed some other sound completely. I think I’m going to yank the strings entirely. I can give the cello line to the bassoons and drop the horns into the bass clef to cover what the violas were handling. I keep forgetting that the horns have this ungodly range. In fact, I keep wondering whether I need trombones at all, just add another two horns and keep them in the bass clef.

At any rate, I’ll see if I can get this done tonight and report back.

late evening: Actually, I think that was it. I didn’t use the horns like I thought I would, but the woodwind choir fits the bill quite nicely. The strings join back in on the “gathered by fools in heaven” line, and it moves smoothly on.

So now I need to orchestrate the little descending star patterns leading into the final repeat of the “intro” theme, and then hopefully I know what I’m doing from there to the end.

I’m having real problems with mm. 76-80 of Milky Way, the rat’s sullen complaint and prediction, “What’s gathered by fools in heaven will never endure.”

I want it to sound low and sullen so that the final quatrain sounds elated, but it just sounds gawky and unpleasant. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my orchestration style in this piece can only be described as “pointillistic” or “mosaic-like,” i.e., instruments enter willy-nilly to provide color and then just as suddenly drop out again. But this passage just sounds clumsy.

I thought about taking the low strings and making them pizzicato, but I’m not sure that cellos can actually pluck that kind of sequence, quickly arpeggiated sixteenth notes. Perhaps they could divide them up?

Part of the problem also is that I’ve scored it in patches, so that there’s truly not a smooth transition from one measure to the next, and whole voices just disappear.

It’s all a matter of balance, I suppose, and finding the will to tinker with it. I’m so close to the end!!

This was a lazy day: all I did was replay about half the sound files for William Blake’s Inn, apply reverb in SndSampler, and upload the corresponding mp3s to the William Blake page.

I also made myself a new CD for the van.

Well, if I’m bored enough this afternoon, I may actually attempt a little more orchestration of Milky Way‘s recapitulation.

I girded my loins and returned to Milky Way. I worked all night on smoothing out the lumps in mm. 61-75. It’s better, but I still have some polishing to do. The subito p at m.64 still sounds gulpy, but that might not be an issue with an actual orchestra.

There are other places where there are gaps in the sound, but I don’t know whether I want to add the missing instruments for those measures. Tutti can be boring.

I’ll keep listening and make some decisions.

And now you can listen too: turning off the reverb makes the thing bearable for my little laptop. It won’t sound as lush, of course, but all the notes are there. Here’s the mp3.

I went back to work on Milky Way tonight. ::sigh::

I worked on the child’s exultant cry that he’ll “never part day from night!” and the recapitulation moment. ::sigh:: I used the SoftSynth instruments so that the computer wouldn’t bog down with hiccups and glitches, and it was sounding good in a sketched-out kind of way.

Then I switched over to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. ::sigh:: Now it sounds like crap, all unbalanced and blaring.

One positive thing: I found that by turning off the “ambience” setting, i.e., reverb, there are a lot fewer hiccups.

It still sounds like crap. ::sigh::

So today I went to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall. My plan was simple: find a MacBook Pro with at least 2GB of RAM, pop the Milky Way Finale file onto it, and then see if Finale could play it. I even made an appointment at the Genius Bar so that I wouldn’t have to flag down a passing teenager with a black t-shirt on.

Well, Genius is as genius does, and we all know about simple plans.

They didn’t have Finale loaded on any of the machines, and in fact they don’t sell it in the store at all. (They do sell one of MakeMusic’s entry level programs.) The Genius turned me over to a salesperson, who suggested that he see if they had a refurbished MacBook Pro that met my specifications, and then I could buy it and take it home to see if it worked.

If it didn’t work (and even if it did), I could return it, and since it was a refurbished model there would be no restocking fee.

Wouldn’t you know it, there was no such machine in the back room. So I was spared the indignity of having to buy a $3000 used machine to take home and try out.

The rest of the day I spent with Jobie doing the usual: shopping, seeing a movie, grabbing a burger at a gay sports bar. This was the first time I was ever in a gay bar where I felt out of place, so to speak: twenty televisions, all tuned to some football game, and a bar full of jocks screaming at them. The fact that some of the jocks were kissing each other wasn’t the problem.

We will now pause while Marc makes some egregious comment connecting the above paragraph and the title of this post.

Anyway, when I returned home, I went to Finale’s website and posted my problem on the user forum, which is what I should have done in the first place.