Category: Lichtenbergianism

Lichtenbergian goals, 2014

Posted on by Dale

It’s that time of year again for me to explain myself: the Lichtenbergians had our Annual Meeting last Saturday night, and as usual we had to declare our creative goals for the coming year.

I was astonished to find that I had actually met some of my 2013 goals, mostly because I could not remember what they were.  (I was not astonished to find that I hadn’t even blogged about them last  year.)  Honestly, all I could remember was that I had once again listed the Five Easier Pieces and a song for John Tibbetts as goals, and that I had done neither.  Also honestly, “continuing to work on the Book of the Labyrinth” was not that arduous a goal, but after the year I’ve had, I’ll take what I can get.

But recently I think I may have gotten traction in my creative impulses, and so I’ve gotten bolder for my 2014 goals.  Here they are:

Five Easier Pieces

A set of piano pieces that serve as companion to and apology for Six Preludes (no fugues).  I actually struck a blow at these over the year, but I think now I’m ready to proceed.

A song for John Tibbetts

This one just gets tougher the longer I wait, because the longer I wait, the more he becomes friends with real, world-wide famous composers and the better taste he develops. I have written the text, so that’s a start.

SUN TRUE FIRE

One of the most common form of spam comments on blogs these days is the kind that uses a netbot to assemble random passages of text from the internet at large and then paste them into the body of emails in blocks of about 50 words, accompanied by links to dangerous places.  Mostly these are about one “paragraph” long, but recently the Lichtenbergian site received one that is magnificent in its length and in its poetry.  You can see it here.

I want to write a work for chorus, soli, and orchestra based on this text.  In 2014, my plan is immerse myself in the possibilities of the text and to quite frankly “steal” bits from pieces of music that appeal to me and to write fragments of music based on those bits.  It’s kind of a training year in that regard.  In 2015, perhaps, I’ll start to work on the piece directly.  SUN TRUE FIRE.

Waste Books

To that end, and to all these ends, I am going to embark on a year-long waste book project.

One of the things Georg Christoph Lichtenberg is famous for is his aphorisms.  (I would direct you to the Lichtenbergian website to see some of them, but the Quote Rotator plug-in broke on the last WordPress update.  Try here.)  His practice was to jot down in a notebook all the random thoughts that occurred to him, and then to transfer them to better notebooks later.

He got the practice from merchants, who would scribble the day’s transactions down in such a “waste book” during the hurly-burly of business, then transfer them cleanly to the account books in the evening.

This is not an uncommon practice, of course.  Any writer worth his/her salt does this anyway; many do it electronically these days.  But I’ve found that I can get more ideas written down and remembered if I use pen and paper.

The impetus was an email from a fun company in Chicago that linked to one of their brands, Field Notes.  Always a sucker for office supplies, I actually subscribed to their “Colors” year-long subscription, not because I thought I would be getting the coolest notebooks ever—sorry, Field Notes, that’s still Moleskine—but because it would force me to do it: to write down every thought that comes to me about the various projects I’m working on, or thinking about working on, and then expanding on those thoughts in project-specific notebooks.

I even bought the cool little pine box to store them in.  It comes with dividers and a calendar.

I will have to add that the Field Notes notebooks are very nice indeed, and the guys at the company are pretty generous: in addition to the things I actually ordered, they threw in extra notebooks, pencils, etc.  I’m starting the year with fifteen notebooks altogether, three of which I have already begun.

Burning Man

I turn 60 in May, and I’m determined that I am going to go to Burning Man Festival this year.  My friends Craig and David, also celebrating milestones this year, are planning to be part of the team.  (There may be others in the months to come.)

Part of the gestalt of Burning Man is that you have to be a participant, not an observer, and an image of what I and the team could do to contribute to the process came to me last week.  I’m using the notebook to flesh those ideas out, document the process as it were.  That’s all I’m going to say about that for the time being.

A Christmas Carol

In a meeting with Newnan Theatre Company’s artistic director Tony Daniel recently, I offered NTC a shot at William Blake’s Inn and also a revival of my Christmas Carol.  He seemed interested in CC so I said I’d try to reconstruct the entire show, since all those MIDI files from decades ago have vanished.

You may imagine my astonishment when I was told at the Lichtenbergian meeting that indeed NTC was announcing my CC for next December.  Well.  It seems one of my goals for 2014 is to completely reconstruct the score for the show from my original hand-written score from 1981, since there’s nothing else to go on.

Over the years we did the show, it grew from a piano and cello kind of thing to a full-scale MIDI orchestral accompaniment.  The Overture, in fact, was never written down but developed completely in the sequencing software I was using at the time.  I’ve decided to go back to live accompaniment: piano, synth, cello, clarinet/flute, and glockenspiel/bells.  Essentially I’m having to approach the thing as a new work, and we all know how well I respond to that.

Still, it’s a public performance of my music and I mustn’t sneeze at that.  I’m really looking forward to it, because in reviewing the piece over the last month I was super-pleased to find that it still held up, and when I mentioned it on Facebook there was an immediate flurry of reminiscensces and quotes.  Heartwarming and encouraging, it was.

So there are my goals for this coming year.

Cras melior est.

Implied projects

Posted on by Dale

Let’s look at all the creative projects implied by the mess in my study.  I think I’ll just list them.  Commentary would be superfluous.

  • A Perfect Life, a rambling memoir of sorts of what life was like for an educated upper middle class white male in the turn of the 21st century
  • painting:
    • the Field series
    • the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
    • general drawing
    • Artist Trading Cards
    • learning to mix colors, especially for portraiture
  • rescore A Christmas Carol
  • rescore William Blake’s Inn
  • find a home for William Blake’s Inn
  • archive all the GHP stuff
  • compose
    • Five Easier Pieces
    • the Symphony
    • a song for John Tibbetts II
    • other stuff…
  • continue my reading/writing/exploration of ritual and meditation
  • make the little icon/box
  • learn counterpoint so that someday there might actually be a Six Fugues (without preludes)

Wow.  That’s not a lot.  You’d think I would have already gotten all this done.

2012 Lichtenbergian goals

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I have not blogged since November.  Sue me.

This past Friday night, I was hosting the meeting of interviewers for music and visual arts for Saturday’s statewide GHP interviews.  Two of my favorite people in the world, David and Maila Springfield, walked in, and the first thing Maila does, after hugging me with delight, is hand me a CD.

This was pretty momentous.  The CD contained her performance of her world premiere performance of Six Preludes (no fugues), which of course were written for her.  I got through the meeting somehow, then got into my car and popped the CD in.

The first thing you notice is that it’s a live performance and nothing at all like the computer version we’ve all come to know and love.  And the second thing you notice, after repeated listenings, is that even with the inevitable mistakes of a live performance, this music is pretty damn fine.

If you’re all very good, I may upload my favorites of Maila’s interpretations alongside the computerized versions just so you can hear how astounding a gifted human musician is.

But today, I need to talk about my Lichtenbergian goals for 2012.

We had our Annual Meeting back on December 16, and my life was just too crazy to think about writing about it.  (I actually had completely forgotten about it until this weekend.)  Every now and then I’ll think, “I should blog about that,” but I don’t.  Most of what goes on in my life these days is work related, or extremely personal, and of course I have never blogged about those kinds of things.

So: Lichtenbergian goals.

I think that of my 2011 goals I achieved one: finish the cello sonata.  That was kind of cheating, since I had started it in 2010 and it was due in the spring of 2011 anyway.  The only saving grace, Lichtenbergianism-speaking-wise, is that I didn’t finish it until the fall.

I knew my record would be pretty shoddy.  After all, since April my life has been swamped by GHP, and I was lucky to finish the cello sonata at all.  So I was sanguine about having to face my fellow Lichtenbergians and admit to cras melior est for everything I had claimed to be interested in finishing.  And I knew that my life in 2012 was not going to be any calmer.  For a while it looked as if I might be ramping up a production of William Blake’s Inn for international consumption, but that fell through, and whatever else I had on my mind, GHP would continue to be a Red Queen experience for at least another six months.

So I had decided that I was going to lowball my goals for 2012 just out of self defense.  And “lowball” is being generous.

My 2012 Lichtenbergian goals:

  • Finish a set of piano pieces called Five Easier Pieces as both a companion and an apology for Six Preludes
  • Do something about the westpoint in the labyrinth (I believe those are the actual words reported to me by Jeff Bishop when in fact I could not remember what my second goal was.)

That’s it.

In my defense, I completely forgot about the percussion piece that I was asked to write for this summer (along with the other composers on the GHP staff), so if we like, we can count that as a third goal.  But otherwise, that’s it.

Going to be an easy year, yes sir.

 

Ultimate Lichtenbergian procrastination

Posted on by Dale

I cleaned up my study on Friday, really shoveled the place out.  I mostly got my desk cleaned off, but I barely touched my drafting table.  For those who have never seen my sanctum, I have a massive oak library table, 4×8, with a fake leather top, for my desk, and behind me, my old drafting table serves as my painting table.

Viz.:

The library table/desk
The drafting table

So this morning, while waiting for all the Baptists to clear the street so I could go mulch the labyrinth without disturbing their consciences—because I’m considerate like that—I thought I might at least reorganize the drafting table.

But the first thing that happened was that I picked up a painting that I have not touched in at least 18 months.  Here it is:

Click to see it embiggened.

Wow.  I like this.  I like this a lot.  It is of course one of my old Field series, one of the first, in fact.  It’s a photograph from the New York Times, of skaters in Central Park in the late 19th century with the fabulous Dakota apartment house rising in splendid isolation to the west.  My modus operandi was to paint directly over the photo and turn it into an abstraction.

It actually works, I think.  Don’t do it, Dale.  Do not clear off that drafting table.  Do not get out your gouaches and brushes and start all that up again at this point.  Don’t do it.  It has a kind of sinister energy that appeals to me. don’t do it It makes me feel as if I might have been accomplishing something all that time do not do it.

Ah well, time to mulch the labyrinth.

 

Retreat 2012

Posted on by Dale

It is probably unfortunate that the cabin we’re staying in for this year’s Lichtenbergian Retreat has wifi.

Still, it allows me to live blog, kind of, my work—and that’s a time-honored Lichtenbergian principle.  Nay, it is the very foundation of Lichtenbergianism, doing something semi-valid in order to avoid the actual work.

9:33 am: I’ve been working for about an hour, poking into the nooks and crannies of Finale 2012. It seems that I buy a new version of Finale every time I have a major thing to work on, which always slows me down while I figure out where Finale hid everything this time.  If I were a working composer, I’d go nuts having to relearn all the menus and stuff.  For example, up until now you changed the name of a staff in the staff dialog box.  But now that’s in the new Score Management window.  Feh.

At any rate, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to set up a template for the reorchestration of William Blake’s Inn, which is my major task this weekend.  I think I’ve got it: children, SATB, piano, synth I, synth II, and string quintet.  The synths are actually made up of independent staves, since one of the new tricks Finale can do (just in time for this orchestration) is to change instruments midstream, but if you have a “piano” staff, your only choices are other double-staffed instruments like the harp.  If you have two independent staves grouped as “Synth I,” then your choices open up to all the other instruments.

So yes, the world premiere of William Blake’s Inn, if it happens now, will be with a reduced orchestra.

Why, you ask?  Not to get anybody’s hopes up, but William Blake’s Inn is being considered as the performance we will send to our sister city, Ayr, Scotland.  Next June.

So there’s that.  Yeah.

Two things have become painfully apparent to me: I should have brought a score to look at, and I should have brought my Cinema Display.  The size of the laptop screen is not conducive to zipping through a full orchestral score looking for the part you’re hoping to duplicate.  Oh well.

A score would have been helpful in quickly finding where time/key signature changes happen: I can copy and paste the parts from the original to the new template, but all those changes do not come with them.  With a piece like “Milky Way,” that’s a pain.  Not that I’m going to work on “Milky Way” this weekend.  Stick to the simple ones: “Wise Cow,” “Dance,” “Fire,” that kind of thing.

And actually, just stick to porting over the voices and the strings.  Even the piano parts can wait for the most part.  If I just get the voices/strings laid out in a couple of pieces, then I can start arranging the children’s chorus part, because to be brutally honest, this was never conceived as a piece for children to perform.

More later.

3:38 pm:  It’s almost hot tub time.  Since this morning, I’ve gotten seven of the fifteen pieces transferred into the new template, which seems kind of slow, but some of these are horrors of multiple time signatures.  I have to set up the new blank piece with all the time signatures and key changes ahead of copying and pasting the originals in, or it all goes whacky and it’s easier to start over from scratch.

I have been copying and pasting the piano part as well as the vocals and the strings.  I’ve standardized the solo lines, giving them a separate staff above the chorus, whereas before I think I was saving paper by having solos embedded in the chorus staves.

Above all, I’ve been resisting doing any other work, although with “Rabbit Reveals My Room” and “King of Cats Orders an Early Breakfast,” I did stick in some of Synth I’s stuff, because without it there wouldn’t be much accompaniment to go on.

Big question right now: time to do one more, or hit the hot tub?

Proposed Efforts 2011, Part 2

Posted on by Dale

Continuing my 2001 Proposed Efforts:

Create the new age album Stars on Snow

This has been on my back burner for probably 20 years. I actually played around with it back in the day when I was still on a Mac SE/30 and the music program I had actually printed to a dot matrix printer. The title track I have managed to bring with me through the years as I progressed from one system to another. It was originally written for handbells, but proved too difficult for the players I had available. I converted it into a new age piece, adding string pads and a descant. It’s never been scored, just resides as a direct MIDI compilation.

However, it’s very pretty, and I think this year I want to take the time to write some more miniature, purely attractive pieces to go with it. I have one from the old concept folder, called “Air Pudding,” which I think still works, although it relied for its effectiveness (as did most of the pieces) on sounds that I manipulated on my old Ensoniq VFX keyboard.

In fact, I will probably find myself using those sounds (which I have as VST sounds around here somewhere) within GarageBand rather than Finale, i.e., playing around with sounds, melodies, and harmonies directly rather than “composing” on virtual paper, and creating interesting new instruments with which to orchestrate. I remember the key instrument on “Air Pudding” was something I called SqelchFlute and involved a basic sound called Duct Tape. Imagine a flute sound that started with tearing a piece of duct tape. (Marc, I may require your assistance in getting up to speed with these technologies; I haven’t done any of it since everything went virtual.)

I have a few other pieces I could use already: “Ginny’s Valentine“, and “Bring a Torch“, also originally for handbells and soprano. Both would be re-orchestrated. (Sharp observers will recognize “Ginny’s Valentine” as the cheesy paean to love at the end of the penguin opera, extended and lyricized.)

In the back of my head, I imagine myself producing the next Deep Breakfast. If I keep in mind that the goal is to please and delight, then I might just do it.

Create the westpoint sculpture

For about two years now, I have had in mind a focal point for the western point of the labyrinth. I’m going to make myself construct this thing this year. I am. I will.

2011 Proposed Efforts, part 1

Posted on by Dale

Let’s talk about my Proposed Efforts for 2011. Some of them are rollovers from 2010. A couple are new.

First, the list:

  • finish the cello sonata
  • write a good short story
  • play with the 24-Hour Challenge again
  • continue painting
  • create my new age album, Stars on Snow
  • create the westpoint sculpture

Since I have today and tomorrow before 2011 actually begins, I’ll break this up into a couple of posts. More blogging for me, more reading for you.

Finish the cello sonata

This is a new goal, but actually it’s cheating. Of course I’m going to finish the cello sonata. However, what I’ve written so far does not satisfy me. In the first movement, the two themes are good, but my approach to the development is more strophic than I think is appropriate. I want to double back and really break those two themes up into their basic elements and use those to play with the listener’s perceptions. As for the third movement, I really like the first part, but that “stopping for a pretty interlude” thing is threatening to become a crutch. Why do I keep doing that?

All of this, especially idea of reworking of the development in the first movement, is making my stomach hurt.

Write a good short story

A carryover. Nothing to be said until I actually start working on it. Sharp observers may have noted that I did not rollover my goal from last year of starting A Perfect Life. I’m going to leave that one to the universe. If it happens, it happens. First I have to clean off my desk.

Play with the 24-Hour Challenge again

Another rollover, but a worthy one. After I finish the cello sonata I have no more projects (other than the new age album), so it will be fun to do this again. Last time, I actually came up with a great deal of usable material; it will be like storing up nuts for the winter.

Continue painting

Of course. It’s more like “pick up my brushes again,” but still.

To be continued…

Lichtenbergian goals, 2010

Posted on by Dale

Last Saturday night, the Lichtenbergian Society held its Annual Meeting around the fire. As longtime readers of this blog know, part of our ritual involves setting creative goals for the coming year, and before that confessing how well we did on the goals of the year just past.

So, before I get to my Lichtenbergian Proposed Efforts for 2011, let’s look at how I did in 2010. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, I had achieved all my goals last year , a matter of some shame to me , so my goals for this year were deliberately calibrated to be worth failing at.

Here are those Proposed Efforts for 2010:

  • continue my painting, both the abstract Field series and my studies for the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
  • restart the 24-Hour Challenge, which to my surprise I had proposed last year to do only for six months, which is just about what I managed
  • compose one complete work, any description
  • write one good short story
  • begin work on A Perfect Life, my proposed description of what it’s like to live a life like mine
  • and in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

How’d I do?

I did continue my painting, although I didn’t really work on the Field series (sorry, Seth.) I worked on the ELP for the first half of the year, and yet the very week I went to visit Diane Mize for instruction on mixing color, I stopped painting to concentrate on music.

I did not restart the 24-Hour Challenge. I still have #12, #13, and #14 on sticky notes on my monitor, waiting for me to pick up the whole thing.

I did not write any short story, good or otherwise. The idea for the good one is still in my head, though.

I did not begin A Perfect Life, despite having the entire summer to do so.

I did produce a boatload of crap: drawings, paint sketches, music detritus.

Where I did succeed was in composing a complete work. In fact, I finished three and a half: Pieces for Bassoon & String Quartet; Six Preludes (No Fugues); Variations on ‘Resignation’; and made great strides on the cello sonata.

All three complete pieces are what I would consider worth hearing, especially the Preludes. I listened to all this year’s output this week, and I am very pleased at how well they hold up.

All in all, a respectable finish. I achieved some of the goals, and was completely unable even to start a couple of them. All praise to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg!

Hm.

Posted on by Dale

It has occurred to me that I need to be deciding on what my Lichtenbergian goals for 2011 are going to be, since the Annual Meeting is a week away. Some of them will be easy: they’re the ones I didn’t accomplish this year. Others will be easy as well: think cello sonata.

The new goals, though… Hm.

The Parable of the Great City

Posted on by Dale

Once a man returned from the dead and began to tell his friends what had befallen him.

“I rose from my body,” he said, “and I was grateful to be free finally of the suffering of life. I could see you all standing over my body, stricken with what seemed to be grief, but I felt nothing but gratitude.

“I did not move. I did not go towards a light. There did not seem to be a light. On the contrary, as I hovered in the room, everything seemed to fade away. I cannot say how long it took, whether it were a long time or short, but eventually the room was gone and I found myself in a vast darkness that was nonetheless bathed in light.

“I felt no fear. There were with me countless others, suspended in the great void. There may have been a sound of singing, or music of some kind. I cannot tell now. I do not remember silence.

“All were moving towards what appeared to be a boundary of some kind. As we moved, I began to see what transpired as the souls reached that line.

“Some began to rise, slowly at first, but then more and more rapidly, to a great city that shone above us, from which a great light streamed and into which those souls entered. Others upon reaching the boundary gave a tremor and before our eyes seemed to unwind like great sheets of fabric twisted after washing in the river, their bodies changing in an instant into great swaths of gossamer, which then dissipated into the void and vanished with a whisper.

“Still I did not fear, but slowly approached the line and awaited my fate: the beautiful city, or nothingness?”

The man’s friends broke in excitedly. “Clearly we see your fate! You were elected to the city, to the beautiful city, for if you had suffered dissolution you would not now be here.”

The man replied, “It is as you say. I am in the beautiful city, I and all the other elect, where we live for ever.”

His friends rejoiced. “Praise be to those who made us and taught us to worship correctly! We see now the right path to eternal bliss. If we follow the teachings of our prophets and the writings of our scribes, we too shall join you in heaven after we die!”

But the man cried out, “No, my brothers, do not rejoice for me, for I am in hell.”