T minus 19 hours...
In which Nathan continues to whine about composition, and shares some amusing things he's heard lately.
Well, the clock's winding down on my shared concert this evening, and I'm really cutting things close. I've managed to get back on track despite being stuck with a partially functional demo version of my notation software (see previous entry) but...composing is hard. I have finished the score, except for about 12 to 16 measures in the second movement. I need to have those 12 measures finished by 6:45 PM, when I do my final pre-concert run-through with Professor McDonald, who is accompanying me on piano. Fortunately, Prof. McD. is an amazing pianist (He'll have played around a dozen pieces on five concerts in nine days after tonight, which he has managed to do without practicing. He'll run through it once or twice in front of the composer, or with the soloist if he's the accompanist, but he doesn't go and work on it on his own. He's that good.) and the second movement is the slow one, so he shouldn't be fazed by the new music.
But the 12 missing bars in the score aren't my only remaining task. I also need to make out my own damn part. I've been playing from the score in rehearsals, as my stripped-down Finale demo lacks the ability to extract single parts from the score. I'll either have to re-enter the trombone part separately (or cut and paste, but I'd still have to add all the expressions and dynamics that didn't get saved) and print it out, or write the part by hand. We'll see how I feel about it in the morning. I did print out the last movement, since I basically wrote that movement as a separate piece three years ago, and had the trombone part right there on my hard drive, and that is the longest movement by number of pages, so things are looking okay. Manageable, at least.
I played the completed 90% of my sonata for my composition class Monday evening, and I got some nice feedback. When we were rehearsing earlier, Professor McDonald said, "I like what you're doing with the first movement. I really like the combination of the vernacular elements [the piano emulates a rock drummer] and 'Nathan's Math.'" Huh what? That's an interesting turn of phrase. Since when did I own math? Sure, math is my bitch, in that I can make it do pretty much whatever I want it to, but that doesn't quite warrant the possessive. Furthermore, I can think of several other compositions I've done which are far better exemplars of 'Nathan's Math,' if that means what I think it means.
When I played the sonata in class on Monday, after I finished the completed portion of the second movement, Felipe, a first-year student from Brazil, said, "You know what would go well with what you wrote?" I presumed he meant adding another instrument, and I imagined viola or flute set against the trombone and piano. "A glass of scotch." Ahh. I can certainly see that. It fits a hell of a lot better than 'Nathan's Math.'
Lately Marco, the 45-year-old first-year student from Italy, has been the catalyst for some unusual remarks. At a rehearsal on Sunday, he was describing how another Italian composer was accusing him of being a fake for dealing in jazz: "He said to me, 'You are not a real musician. All you do is this jazz. Everything you do, I can do too, but I choose not to.'" Professor McDonald suggested a continuation of this conversation: "So then you told him, 'Look, we don't we stop sucking each other's dicks and say what we really think?'" Pretty strong stuff, coming from a professor who usually has an almost Buddha-like serenity. Of course, the week before, he came up to his office for my weekly private composition lesson saying, "I must warn you: I've just been in a long meeting, and my lifetime bullshit-meter has just gotten permanently pegged. I have no more tolerance for bullshit, ever." Which of course makes academia the perfect place for him...
In class on Monday, Marco managed to top all that with a doozy of his own. Professor McDonald was talking about a piece he had written for one of his students to play: "Oh, I'm sure Alex can manage it. He's quite sophisticated." Marco asked, "When you say 'sophisticated,' do you mean as in evoluted, or 'sophisticated' as in trans-gendered?" What?!? We never bothered to figure out what Marco was trying to say...we concluded it was a pleasant example of something being "found in translation."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say.
Well, the clock's winding down on my shared concert this evening, and I'm really cutting things close. I've managed to get back on track despite being stuck with a partially functional demo version of my notation software (see previous entry) but...composing is hard. I have finished the score, except for about 12 to 16 measures in the second movement. I need to have those 12 measures finished by 6:45 PM, when I do my final pre-concert run-through with Professor McDonald, who is accompanying me on piano. Fortunately, Prof. McD. is an amazing pianist (He'll have played around a dozen pieces on five concerts in nine days after tonight, which he has managed to do without practicing. He'll run through it once or twice in front of the composer, or with the soloist if he's the accompanist, but he doesn't go and work on it on his own. He's that good.) and the second movement is the slow one, so he shouldn't be fazed by the new music.
But the 12 missing bars in the score aren't my only remaining task. I also need to make out my own damn part. I've been playing from the score in rehearsals, as my stripped-down Finale demo lacks the ability to extract single parts from the score. I'll either have to re-enter the trombone part separately (or cut and paste, but I'd still have to add all the expressions and dynamics that didn't get saved) and print it out, or write the part by hand. We'll see how I feel about it in the morning. I did print out the last movement, since I basically wrote that movement as a separate piece three years ago, and had the trombone part right there on my hard drive, and that is the longest movement by number of pages, so things are looking okay. Manageable, at least.
I played the completed 90% of my sonata for my composition class Monday evening, and I got some nice feedback. When we were rehearsing earlier, Professor McDonald said, "I like what you're doing with the first movement. I really like the combination of the vernacular elements [the piano emulates a rock drummer] and 'Nathan's Math.'" Huh what? That's an interesting turn of phrase. Since when did I own math? Sure, math is my bitch, in that I can make it do pretty much whatever I want it to, but that doesn't quite warrant the possessive. Furthermore, I can think of several other compositions I've done which are far better exemplars of 'Nathan's Math,' if that means what I think it means.
When I played the sonata in class on Monday, after I finished the completed portion of the second movement, Felipe, a first-year student from Brazil, said, "You know what would go well with what you wrote?" I presumed he meant adding another instrument, and I imagined viola or flute set against the trombone and piano. "A glass of scotch." Ahh. I can certainly see that. It fits a hell of a lot better than 'Nathan's Math.'
Lately Marco, the 45-year-old first-year student from Italy, has been the catalyst for some unusual remarks. At a rehearsal on Sunday, he was describing how another Italian composer was accusing him of being a fake for dealing in jazz: "He said to me, 'You are not a real musician. All you do is this jazz. Everything you do, I can do too, but I choose not to.'" Professor McDonald suggested a continuation of this conversation: "So then you told him, 'Look, we don't we stop sucking each other's dicks and say what we really think?'" Pretty strong stuff, coming from a professor who usually has an almost Buddha-like serenity. Of course, the week before, he came up to his office for my weekly private composition lesson saying, "I must warn you: I've just been in a long meeting, and my lifetime bullshit-meter has just gotten permanently pegged. I have no more tolerance for bullshit, ever." Which of course makes academia the perfect place for him...
In class on Monday, Marco managed to top all that with a doozy of his own. Professor McDonald was talking about a piece he had written for one of his students to play: "Oh, I'm sure Alex can manage it. He's quite sophisticated." Marco asked, "When you say 'sophisticated,' do you mean as in evoluted, or 'sophisticated' as in trans-gendered?" What?!? We never bothered to figure out what Marco was trying to say...we concluded it was a pleasant example of something being "found in translation."
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all I have to say.