In the past month or so I’ve been to two contemporary music concerts that featured duets consisting of instrument and voice – one that was trumpet and voice, one that was bassoon and voice.
I haven’t written for a lot of voice nor listened to a lot of contemporary music that features voice, but it struck me how the inclusion of voice sets up an expectation of hierarchy – the voice is usually the dominant force…
It was about one year ago when I made the decision to write Minkowski Etudes as a work for solo trumpet and interactive electronics. Last week my performer Dylan premiered it in its entirety for his senior recital and he also played it as a part of the Southern Sonic Festival. The Max programming needs some final tweaking and I may want to redo my cue structure by using Antescofo (I have to decide if I want to pay for the annual Ircam fee), but given that a bulk of the creative, notational, and programming work is now complete, I thought I’d write a quick retrospective about it. First off…
Back in 2009 I was fairly obsessed with Chain Factor – a game by Frank Lantz that would later become Zynga’s Drop7. I got good enough at it to be a consistent name in the all-time ranked leaderboard, always trading top 10 scores with some other person whose user handle i can’t recall anymore, so i decided that I wanted to record a video of me doing a decent run. The run took 22 minutes, and at the time YouTube’s maximum video length was 10 minutes, so i had to find a way to edit/speed it up.
That led to me creating my first real video editing project that i eventually titled Chain Factor Chaos:
It’s a pretty rough final product execution wise, and conceptually i don’t like what I did with the first big “section” anymore (the first 3’40”), but I’m still incredibly happy with the rest of it leading to the recap transition (3’40”-9’00″ish). A part of me would love to take a second crack at it given the sort of video editing chops I have now, but a) i don’t know that I still have access to the source video anymore, and b) if it came down to it i’d rather do something new from scratch than re-hash an old project.
In any case, when I posted my blog entry that talked about the project, Frank Lantz happened to come across it and commented on it saying how much he liked it. I remember feeling very touched (and, truth be told, a little overwhelmed) that he took the time to write to me. I wrote him an email to say “you’re welcome”, and we had a brief email exchange where he gave me more nice words about it. After that exchange, that was that.
Fast forward eight years later to yesterday.
Recently, a new browser game called Universal Paperclips has made the viral rounds. It’s what some people classify as an “idler”, and it’s a game type i’ve enjoyed playing in the past, so when my brother shared it with me, I said, “sure, i’ll give it a shot.” After I finally finished the game (which ended up taking a few days), there was an end credit line that said, “(c) 2017 by Frank Lantz”.
And i was like, “i recognize that name… oh! It’s the Chain Factor guy!” It took me a moment, but even after eight years I remembered who he was, the interactions we exchanged. So i found him on twitter, and said, “hey, i just finished your new game, remember me?” and he tweeted me back and said, “Of course!”, said he still found the video amazing, and it was nice to reconnect. I told him that his game was great and that I was going to play it as part of a video game marathon for charity, and he tweeted a link to my charity page and also gave me a donation.
Such a random eight-years-apart reconnection made with a damned awesome guy. I might start using twitter more often because it definitely shouldn’t be another eight years before we interact again.
