September 23, 2004
It’s Done!
I finished the new percussion piece last night. It’s completely finished — parts and score are printed and bound, and it’s in an envelope, ready to deliver tomorrow. As always, it’s a relief to finish a new piece. This was a difficult project. The past few pieces have felt really hard while I was working on them.
I’ve been trying to do something different with each of the past three pieces. “Under the Rug” was a parody of 1950s television music, “Wrong-Mountain Stomp” was an attempt at bluegrass, and the new piece, tentatively titled “Mass,” was my first real attempt at writing a minimal piece. I’ve tried writing in a minimal style several times before, but I usually give up after about 4 bars. It’s really difficult to build tension through repetition without letting the piece become boring.
I’ve created Mackey-Meets-Reich-lite. Very, very lite.
Now that the piece is done, I can catch up on a few other things. In addition to uploading the score and audio for “Mass,” I’ve just posted the audio from the premiere performance of “Under the Rug.”
Next agenda item : practice NCAA College Football 2005 on the PS2. It will be a busy weekend.
Comments
abacus says
Congratulations.
I think we should create a math problem to determine what your next piece will be. Here goes:
If u=under the rug, w=wrong mountain stomp, and m=mass, predict the next item in the series: u,w,m...
So if we translate the letters to numbers according to their positions in the alphabet, that gives us a series of: 21, 23, 13...
And if we posit an alternating, repeating pattern, it could be -2, -10, -2, -10...
Which means the next item in the series is 11, or k.
And of course, k=kielbasa: a polka!
Spooky, isn't it?
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