Archive for April, 2010

Looking up

Friday, April 30th, 2010

[IMAGE] bald eagle

[IMAGE] bald eagle

…click to listen:

…about the music

Music to glide by.

I’m pretty sure that if anyone watched me just outside my studio, they would have no idea that I’m a musician, and instead assume that I’m a photog for National Geographic or something. I am almost never without my Big Camera With The Long Ass Zoom Lens; a paparazzi lying in wait for feathered and pawed celebs that lurk in my ‘hood.

Of course, much as those of us with honkin’ digital project studios are always jonesing for the newest, latest hardware and software, well, now I can add to my addiction: I am seriously wanting a Bigger and Even More Long Ass zoom lens. This is just too much fun, especially because I have no clue whatsoever what I’m doing. I liken myself to a dog dancing on its hind legs: it’s not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.

[IMAGE] bald eagle

These are certainly not great shots. I ain’t gettin’ no naturalist photo gigs out of this point-and-shoot portfolio. But the pleasure I get from stepping outside to the deck or shoreline many times a day and shifting my concentration from all the sonic chaos in my head, to the visual serenity that surrounds me, is the most amazing “second job” I could wish for.

[IMAGE] bald eagle

[IMAGE] bald eagle

Busy as a B. And possibly a K and a Q, too.

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

[IMAGE] bees

[IMAGE] bee backside

…click to listen:

…about the music

Music for insects on the go.

Since returning from my most recent trip to New York, I’ve had a productive month of composing and living on this gorgeous floating rock that holds many more animals than people. I’ve been mesmerized watching spring become a verb through the actions of each tree, bird, and newborn lamb or foal surrounding me, and that vision inspired my muses as I wrote the electroacoustic band piece for which I had my first, really fun rehearsal today. I can’t wait to see these kids again; they’re a delight. And even more of a delight than they were just yesterday before they heard the piece, since they like the music I wrote them and called it “awesome.” High, high praise from a 13 year old, and I’m grateful.

In the early morning, I leave once again for a place that holds many more people than animals. And, far more composers than here, too: southern California. I’ve got a very full, word-and-idea-and composer-intensive week ahead, beginning with two ASCAP Composer Career Workshops: one in San Diego, and the next in Hollywood. I’ll be joined by three distinguished colleagues, and we’ll share whatever we’ve learned about this wacky music life with our peers, who, just like us, are trying to learn more about this wacky music life. Then I’ll speak on a panel for the ASCAP I Create Music EXPO about this wacky music life and lot of ways to make it even more rewarding if you think outside the taco shell. Somewhere in there I’ll do a few mentoring sessions at the EXPO with composers seeking further info about this wacky music life (hey, ya want wacky, I’m your gal), and finally, because apparently I just will not have talked enough, I’ll moderate a Los Angeles Composers Salon, featuring even more composers, most if not all of whom are a tad wacky.

This will be “old home week” for me, as I’m immersed in a happy world of colleagues who are every bit as passionate about what they do as I am. Many of them became good friends during the years that L.A., not some funny little island, was my address. While I don’t miss much about that city in terms of daily life, I always love being amidst large groups of my amiable composer pals. They are every bit as inspiring as the springtime. And, nearly as wacky as I. Thank goodness.

[IMAGE] yellow jacket

Prehistoric

Monday, April 12th, 2010

[IMAGE] Great Blue Heron

[IMAGE] Great Blue Heron

…click to listen:

…about the music

Older, in a suite way.

I think I love pelicans and herons so much because in flight, they look like ancient pterodactyls. And, after a phone interview I gave to a very pleasant college student yesterday, I suspect my affinity toward them must be because they feel like immediate family. The composition student asked excellent questions for his report, and wisely focused on things like “what advice to you have for getting started as a professional composer,” and, “what would you do differently if you were beginning your career now?”. To the latter query, I’d say, “arrange to be born twenty years later.” Because as I answered the former, I suddenly realized that virtually none of the tools on which I currently rely for my work and which I ardently teach students and peers to use, existed in 1983 when I left Manhattan School of Music for the great big composing world out there. None.

Well, almost none: the year before, I had received a new invention of something called a Telephone Answering Machine as a gift from a boyfriend (he must have liked me at least enough to want to leave messages for future date plans). It was new technology, and of course one had to offer instructions on the outgoing message as to just what the heck the unsuspecting caller should do upon hearing the mysterious beep. Twenty eight years later, I remain amused by people’s messages with the same, plodding instructions. C’mon, folks, I think we know how to work it now.

So, geez, as I talked to this budding 19 year old composer, did I feel old all of a sudden. I immediately realized that my start in the music business would have been about a hundred times faster, had I had the computer and internet connection he and his classmates take for granted. My first computer, an adorable Macintosh SE/30, followed me home in 1989. It was nearly as good looking as that boyfriend. Soon after, I set up my first real project studio, having had the semblance of one, sans computer but mit Yamaha DX7 and four-track cassette tape, since 1984. Life was good. Intricate home recording via MIDI was the new frontier, and I was an avid cowgirl.

But despite the fact that we now cannot imagine a moment of our lives without them, the inter-tubes did not enter our daily existence until the mid-nineties. And that newest frontier changed everything. With social networking, endless personal web presences and tons of opportunities to instantly become a known quantity by participating in the online communities of our choice, building a career from scratch became a lot more possible. I’m proof: I shifted mine across the deep abyss from film and TV scoring to concert music in 1999, and my ability to successfully do so as a complete unknown in that part of the music world, was almost entirely because of those intertubes.

But I emphasize almost. Because the most important part of the music business, and probably of any business, is building relationships. Whether one does that in person or in pixels, without them, we’re down the tubes, and soon to be extinct ancient history. Squawk!

Humming along

Friday, April 9th, 2010

[IMAGE] Hummingbird
[IMAGE] Hummingbird

…click to listen:

…about the music

Please hum.

Yes, it’s me with the birds again. In a moment of harmonic stultification this afternoon, when I realized that my ears were so overloaded with chords and notes and rhythms that they could no longer hear straight, I grabbed a popsicle and sat on the waterside deck in the sunshine for a little break. But an amateur, shutter-addicted, photog’s work is never done, and surrounded by so many lovely things buzzing and flying around me, from flower-drugged bumble bees to cutely-mugged chickadees, once the popsicle was out of my hands, my camera was back in them.

It was a welcome contrast, from the thick sounds of the electroacoustic band piece I’m finishing up in my headphones, to those of bird calls and wings flapping around my head. I steadied the camera on my knees and laid in waiting, motionless, on my visual hunt for a hummer in process. And, I captured him.

[IMAGE] Hummingbird

Getting my ducks in a… ?

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

[IMAGE] right side up

[IMAGE] upside down

…click to listen:

…about the music

Things are going swimmingly.

I often say that composing is a faith-based activity. I can go for quite a while under deadline without managing to come up with anything. I don’t mean anything I like. I mean, anything at all. I am the Queen of the Procrasti Nation, and being pretty busy, there’s plenty to procrastinate with. But despite the impending, career-denting doom that could occur, I never fret (well, okay, I fret, but I don’t take it that seriously). Why? Because after 32 years of composing music under the stress of deadlines, I’ve never failed to meet my delivery date with something I’m not embarrassed by (hmm… it’s possible that my standards are far too low). Once you’ve done this sort of thing that many times, you just have faith that you can, and will, do it again (in other words, this is not a technique I recommend to someone with their very first pro gig). Now watch; having had the hubris to type this, something will screw up next week that will have me in a real bind.

So here I am, nearing my deadline, and just about done with a really fun electroacoustic wind band piece for the American Composers Forum’s BandQuest series that’s funded by the NEA, and I appear to have my ducks in a row. And like the guys in the photos above right outside my studio, sometimes that can be in some rather creative positions.

Action shots

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

[IMAGE] roof hail

[IMAGE] roof hail

[IMAGE] deck hail

…click to listen:

…about the music

Lights… roll film… action!

It takes a woman with a very boring life to not only post photos of hail in its gerund form, but to even shoot them in the first place. Nonetheless, I share my ditzy joy with you: yesterday morning’s very intense and long hail storm that left almost an inch of the stuff glistening everywhere for half the day. It was dramatic! It looked like a blizzard coming down… a very LOUD blizzard.

HEAR the repetitive thudding on the metal roof! SEE the powerful flow of pea-sized ice pellets pouring down! SENSE the chill in the otherwise springtime air! WATCH as my property turns into an early April winter wonderland!
Wait… there’s something not right about that…

Oh, and EXPERIENCE the edge-of-their-chair excitement of Moses and Smudge through it all:

[IMAGE] cat nap

All hail the unflappable kitties! Who needs lithium, when you can just glance at these guys?