castles in the air

[danger03]

Now I want to either be a professional clarinetist or a high school physics teacher. That's what I tell my friends, parents, and academic advisers.  But that's not the whole truth.  One day I might--just might--like to compose as well.

Over the years I've toyed with the idea in my head.  Lately I've given more serious thought to acutally what I

Comments

[forcemajeure]

I liked this entry a lot; writing about music is difficult (insert Laurie Anderson's quote about how talking about music is like swimming about architecture).

Doug has ambitious desires to compose too, and is trying to go about it incrementally, starting with smaller bits of music and working up. Brian Eno is often asked about the sound he composed for Microsoft, which plays when Windows 95 boots up; in a San Francisco Chronicle interview, he said:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it."

The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long."

I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel.

In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
That's where Doug is right now; learning to compose very simple bits of music, playing around with some very old melodies. He's very fond of mercilessly stealing from Baroque and pre-Baroque music; he has a whole folder full of notes about the music in Susato's dances. But he's gone from trying to write big to writing small and working his way up.

"It's a nice thing to know what you need to learn," he says.