"Scoreplay"

Complete with a Microsoft Office template designed for screenplays, the scoreplay is pretty cool if you ask me...

As promised, I have an update on what I am currently working on, namely, my new (and first) piece for wind ensemble, The Lady, or the Tiger?, based on the short story by Frank Stockton.  (I discussed some preliminary details about this piece in a previous entry.)  While I have been working a little on the actual music (in addition to writing a clarinet solo piece on the side to keep my creative juices flowing), the bulk of the work has been planning out how exactly this piece will unfold.

The first task was to shorten the text a little, to keep the piece from becoming too long.  What is too long, you may ask?  Well, I hope that when the piece is ready, it will ultimately get performed.  Asking a group to learn a piece that’s 20-plus minutes long by some composer-nobody like myself (at the moment) is a lot to ask, both in terms of rehearsal time and concert time.  On the other hand, I don’t want the piece to be so short that it doesn’t reach its full potential.  A 3-minute piece would be easy to squeeze into a rehearsal or concert, but it would certainly lose some of its positive qualities that would make ensembles want to play it in the first place (in this particular case, anyway).  So I’ve adapted the text, and now it takes me about 10 minutes to read through.  With there being built-in pauses for the narrator and chances for the music to take center stage, the piece might end up being closer to 15 minutes.  In all honesty, this is probably on the long end of things; but, the story is riveting (as I hope the music will be), and my impression is that it won’t necessarily feel like a long piece.

Hear No Music, Be a Subpar Composer

Sean Newhouse made his conducting debut leading the BSO in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9.  Show above is a picture from a different performance, displayed at the conductor's website (http://www.seannewhouse.com).

That is why I was enrolled in some kind of music history course for seven out of my eight semesters at MIT, and why I am continuing to study music history in graduate school despite my major being composition.  (To be fair, some of the music history courses I have taken over the years have fulfilled requirements; but I would have taken them anyway.)  Studying the music that is already out there is a crucial part of being a composer not because all music is recycled, but rather because one has to be aware of the preceding tradition.  New composers need not follow any traditions they may observe or even see themselves as part of one, but they can’t be taken seriously without knowing about who and what have come before them.

Part of being a good composer-listener is attending concerts.  For even with the most advanced technology in sound engineering and the most expensive headphones and speakers, nothing can replace hearing music live at a concert (classical, or otherwise).  To elaborate briefly, I’ll share the opening paragraph from my first-ever concert report in my first-ever formal music class from October 2006:

My Next Project

When one door opens... (I know that’s not how the expression goes, but that’s how the story mentioned below goes...)
Photo by: dnchung (http://vhshouse.blogspot.com/2010/10/anthology-lady-or-tiger.html)

Finishing a composition is a lot like reading the end of the Torah on Simchat Torah: you don't want to linger on the fact that you've completed something.  In the case of reading the end of the Torah, you immediately go back and start reading from the beginning.  In the case of finishing a composition, you start working on something else (if you haven't already).

While I did take a day or two to make the score of my most recent piece (Nishmat) readable and to get in printed and bound with all the necessary accompanying materials (transliteration guide, program note, etc.), I am happy to say that I have started a new project.

[Drumroll, please…]

Some Non-Musical Notes

The logo I designed to use my scores.  Can you identify all of the musical elements in the image?  (answer below)

At some point last semester, in the midst of taking a class about using the music notation software called Finale, I decided to put together a logo for my music.  The result is the snazzy image you see above (if I do say so myself!).

Why “bmpark Music”?  Well the more obvious reason is that my first two initials are B and M, and my last name of course is Park.  More importantly, “bmpark” was my username while at MIT, where I really began to get into music (but I picked my username based on the first reason, namely that it was a form of my name, so if that’s what you were thinking you get partial credit).  “bmpark” is also the domain name of this website.  So it all fits together.

Back in the Swing of Things

I could say the delay has been because of all the snow, but that would just be an excuse... like using the previous part of this sentence as an excuse to post an awesome satellite image of a major snowstorm last month...  Photo by NOAA (www.noaa.gov)

So a whole semester has passed since my last blog entry.  Lots of things have happened since then (as I would hope to be the case for anyone in a five-month period); undoubtedly the most exciting event during that span has been getting engaged.  Let’s just say that If I had won the lottery (which would of course required getting a ticket in the first place), that would have easily ranked second.

Now that I have a semester under my belt (hard to believe that that represents a quarter of the degree program), I feel--as this post’s title suggests--back in the swing of things.  Not that I was sitting around doing nothing last semester, but now I’m more in line with my goal of composing on a regular basis.  To be honest it’s not yet entirely on a daily basis, but I do feel like it is more of a routine, as it should be for any aspiring composer.

As of yesterday, I have completed three new pieces: a piano trio (violin, cello, & piano), Daybreak; a saxophone duet, Birth of a Loaf: From Dough to Crust (more on that in a moment); and a choral work, Nishmat (more on that in two moments).