I’ve never seen the kind of fireworks that are super coordinated presentations all sync’ed by a computer program.  I bet that if composed well i would like that quite a bit, but it’s hard to make a judgement call without having any first hand experience in it.

During the Tulane homecoming fireworks show, as i found myself annoyed at the lack of form and tension and real understanding of how to make that more effective to the common viewer, this idea started to form in my head for a minimalist composition of fireworks that would span over the period of a month or more.

I heard about a piece of music that La Monte Young wrote in which a heavy weight was placed on one of the notes of  a huge pipe organ in a large church in europe somewhere and was essentially blasted at its loudest volume for the span of a couple of weeks.  The idea was based on that basic minimalist principle that an extended sound and a repeating sound isn’t the same as the time you’ve heard it before because the context of time makes it different.  There’s also the idea that the piece served as more of an installation piece – you got to walk around the church and hear how the note was different depending on the particular acoustic area that you were in, and could get yourself lost in the absolute pureness of it as it echoed in grand style that those cathedrals promote.

Thinking about pieces of music or sound installations with that sort of time scale and vastness is what brought about this idea for a fireworks composition.  Pick any beautiful night scene area – in my head i picture a waterfront – and have a single firework go off one night at a designated time.  Chances are, no one would notice it happening – they might hear the sound of it, some may see it, but they wouldn’t think much of it.

The next day do the same thing, but do it with two fireworks.  The next day do three.  All at the same time at night, all at the same location.

At some point, people will catch on to this.  You set it up like clockwork, you create that pattern of one more firework every day, and you start to create expectation.  The number of fireworks that go off have to be easily countable – everyone needs to deduce that gradually the fireworks are adding more and more.

And of course, like all great music, at some point, that pattern needs to be broken.

Exactly how it would be broken is something i don’t know yet.  The “dick move” thing would be to not have fireworks at all one day, but in my head the piece isn’t supposed to be about alienation or pulling the wool from people’s eyes.  The point is to make people excited, and bring people together.  And while i may want to play with that a little, maybe create the hint of disappointment, ultimately i would want to do that as a means to generate new excitement based on the unexpected.

Two easy ideas: first, delay the fireworks by five minutes.  People will start to get restless, maybe some people will wonder if it’s even going to happen, if it’s a wasted trip.  But five minutes is a reasonable delay – start it five minutes later, people whose expectation started to waver will find some small or large degree of exultation when the fireworks actually begin.  Suddenly the event is revitalized, becomes exciting in a new way.

Then for the next week, delay it anywhere between zero minutes and ten minutes.  You don’t want to wait longer because you don’t want to waste people’s time too much – and by creating a variable expectation that no one can really track, people who really want to see the fireworks display will show up on time or early, and in that potential wait time, strangers might talk to each other.  A sense of community develops. people strike up conversation, share in snacks and drinks.  it becomes an event.

The other variation that could get added to the mix is to change the location of the fireworks themselves – in my head i see it as “the audience is facing one way where they’ve always seen the fireworks, and then one day they go to the same spot and they have to turn around.”

The whole thing would happen with no real explanation except that in the area where there’s an optimal viewing vantage point for watching the fireworks, i’d put up a pedestal of some sort with an unmarked QR code on it.  Capture that QR code and you get taken to a website that explains what’s happening.  Maybe right away, or maybe the information will be revealed gradually.

In my head, i think the piece would last about two months.  That feels both long and short – i have to think about it more.

I’m at work, and i want to send someone an ecard.  I google it and pick a random ecard website, discover that you can’t turn off music on their cards by default, decide to move to the next one.

Go to the next one.  Find a card i like, try to open that card up in firefox, but for some reason the flash part isn’t unblocking from my flashblock plugin – i’m just getting a blank screen.  So i grab the link, copy it into Chrome, try it there.  Loads up no problems.

Halfway through the card, i want to see if there’s music playing in the background of the card, so i put in one of my earbuds that is permanently attached to the headphone jack of my work computer.  Yes there’s music, but it’s fairly unobtrusive, basically piano only, a melody that’s moving in a slight triplet swing and a bass line that’s somewhat mimicking that.  single note melody, single note bass, pretty minimal, although the swing feel and the harmonies are a little strange, but whatever.

So i go to the next page in Chrome, where i have to say who i’m sending to, give a custom message, &c.  The card itself isn’t on that page, but the music is still going.  a quarter of a second later i notice that half of the music i was listening to before was missing.  and then i get it.  Even though the visual part of the flash card in Firefox wasn’t running, the card still at least somewhat loaded because it was playing the music from the card in the background.  When i was listening to the card in my earbuds, i was listening to it playing twice in an accidental canon, offset by a few beats and a rough eighth note triplet.

and it was fantastic.  i mean, for the purpose of the ecard, the single simpler version was much better because it was much less intrusive.  but first hearing it in accidental canon and thinking that that’s what was supposed to happen?  outstanding.  it kind of makes me want to write a piece of music composed entirely of samples of crappy ecard music.  file that away for “way in the future” since i have about four other pieces i’m trying to get done before the spring of 2013.

1. my wind ensemble piece entitled beauty…beholder is almost done. I feel a lot better about it than i did about a week ago because things in the end finally started to click into place. It’s not my best work mainly because i’m out of practice writing original stuff for large groups – the last large ensemble piece i wrote was somewhere around ten years ago, and between 2004-2009 i wasn’t writing any music at all. I’m happy enough with the piece generally, it’ll just need some revision if i ever get it performed again. Hopefully it’s well received, i’m a bit tickled with the shock moment towards the end of the piece. John Cage would be proud.

2. This spring i’m going to try to start writing a percussion quartet for the Portland Percussion Group. Originally i was going to have it be all thematic about my family, but these days i tend to do better writing music based on a musical concept that i then translate to a real one as opposed to starting with a real concept that i then translate to a musical one. I think that will change as i start writing more music again and get reacquainted with how my voice translates to solid ideas.

3. Also this spring i’m planning on putting the pieces together for my musical internet installation project. Basically what i’m planning on doing is buying some muscle wire and playing with it in the hopes that i can attach it to some guitar strings and have a mechanism for heating/cooling the muscle wire and a mechanism for playing the strings that is controlled and activated by both random and controlled actions from the internet. This is very early experimental stages so i can figure out what’s possible.

4. Aside from my nienteForte concert happening this spring, Mark and i had a conversation earlier about trying to pitch playing a percussion duet for the percussion ensemble concert run by Doug Walsh, and we’re already talking about trying to write a duet for the nienteForte concert in 2014. I already have a guest ensemble tentatively lined up for that, and i want to write a piece for *that* group too, which i’ll probably start in early summer right after Jazz Fest.

5. Also in mid-spring i’m going to start thinking about marching band arranging again for Hermiston. Paul was very happy with what i did this past season, so i don’t doubt that i’ll be able to write for the group again.

6. I’m planning on putting together a new music seminar class sometime in the spring semester, a volunteer thing since i can’t officially register a course with the university at this point. I just want to get people excited about some of the music that got me excited in college as well as going out there and finding other music, newer stuff that i don’t know to keep my own creative brain fresh and current.

7. Also this spring i imagine that i’ll be in some final talks with Galaxy Interactive to figure out exactly how my contract is going to work for TerraLife, a project that they anticipate will start occupying a lot of my energy this summer.

8. Sometime a year ago, Tyler and i talked about trying to put together some sort of DDR reunion this coming summer. Originally it was going to be another sight-read tournament, but the context for that sort of thing has died out as far as we’re both concerned, so more and more i’m thinking about making it into some big Johann Sebastian Joust competition or something.

I know i’m missing something, but that’s okay. Brain will continue firing off on all of this probably until next fall. Then i can relax.

In general something that’s come to light from this past fall is that I shouldn’t try to tackle a lot of creative projects in the fall. Thankfully i had the foresight to turn down an opportunity to write a piece for Kim Walker’s fianceé who wanted the piece by around christmas. I said no mainly because i knew that the wind ensemble piece was going to take a major chunk of my time, but the thing that i didn’t anticipate was how busy the fall season was – partially brought on by my rather sudden medical issues, but also because the marching band season was much busier than i anticipated it would be and i didn’t have a whole lot of energy to devote to independent projects.

Granted, it’s not like my spring and summer isn’t occupied a great deal as well, but the method behind that busy is much more in line with creative and original efforts as opposed to the fall semester teaching and administering a marching band organization. Clearly a lot depends on exactly how the football schedule falls out, but i’m starting to come to the conclusion that my creative calendar should be much more dense in the spring and summer than in the fall.

We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, much needed website updates coming soon, time to try to send my Timpani piece off to another publisher for consideration of publishing, and keep the ball rolling.

1. Download all of the national anthem MP3s as is available on The Navy Band website.
2. Have one of my friends create a script to rename all of the files (because the files were all named the country of the national anthem) into a random 1 to 5 digit number.
3. Put all of the mp3s into a playlist on my iPhone, listen to them whenever i get a chance on shuffle. Make notes on interesting things by file number via a note in Evernote.

I opted to rename the anthems to random numbers and have someone else do the randomizing because i wanted to be able to listen to and evaluate the music without bias as to where the music originates from or what it represents. Clearly there were a few national anthems that i recognized (US, UK, Canada, France, for example), but for the most part I have no idea what i’m actually listening to.

After having spent probably a few hours listening to the playlist (i’m not sure if i’ve actually gotten through all of the anthems since i’ve had to start the shuffle over at times) and mostly passively (as background as opposed to paying attention), i think i’ve come to the conclusion that my original idea of having all of the national anthems get their spotlight isn’t going to work. Although the piece is going to have a medley sort of feel to it by default, i still want it to be feel more compositional than cut-and-paste-medley.

So what i’m working out in my brain now is making it a little more “Ivesian” for lack of a better made up word – i want to mash anthems together, but in a complementary way as opposed to a clashy way. I may also take some anthem themes and stretch them out rhythmically to provide some sort of slow moving bass line or something, and maybe do some other “masking” to give some of the anthems a unique sort of feel, but without losing the integrity of the anthem itself (so i’m not planning on playing any of them backwards or doing set inversions or silly things like that).

I still have several days of constant listening before i’m going to take some serious notes, and then a few days of listening after that to see if i can start to get a feel for the shape of the piece. That’s really the key – how to take the key material in my head and give the piece a big picture shape and form – once i have that, all of the details can be filled in pretty easily and/or get morphed. If after all of that i can’t get a feel of the big picture shape, i’ll probably go back to the drawing board.

The first idea i had was to steal one of my favorite sections of an old orchestra piece i did for an orchestra composition class in my grad school days because it’s a pretty great section and find a way to expand on it. That’s still the backup plan. But the second and now primary idea that i’m going with is a piece that i’ve been thinking about for the past four or five years now, which is a “anthems of the world” kind of piece, as in i want to incorporate all of the known current national anthems of the world into a huge fused hybrid that’s meant to arrive at some sense of global unity.

The potential backfiring of doing a piece like that is that it’s a pretty big undertaking. If this website is comprehensive as it seems, there are 212 national anthems that exist, and to find a way to journey across all 212 in an eight to ten minute piece that’s due by January 1st when i haven’t written a large ensemble piece in almost a decade seems like i could be biting off more than i can chew. i don’t want to suddenly have to cancel my Christmas vacation plans because, say, i still don’t know how to incorporate the Senegal national anthem into the piece and i don’t want to exclude them because then they could take me hostage or something.

It all boils down to timing. After my two long weeks of band camp are over, i basically have four months to write the piece. Is that enough time? Probably. Is it enough time on top of my full time job, the WSOP satellite event in early December and potentially writing a winter show for Hermiston that would be due around the same time? Maybe.

The one compositional stumbling block that i’ve already been trying to address in my head is how to end the piece. Is there an anthem that can serve as the Big Ending, one anthem that can serve as a climax over any other? As a citizen of the United States i could use that as an obvious answer, but this piece is meant to transcend any personal sense of patriotism i may have; the idea is that no nation is more important than any other, we are all one globe and one world. In that sense, creating an ending climax that resembles *any* of the 212 anthems is problematic, so chances are the music will have to be original and maybe derivative.

The other compositional challenge is how to fuse the anthems together in a way that can ensure that all of the anthems have some time in the spotlight. It’s easy enough to use some of the anthems as background material and i’d probably rely heavily upon that to give the piece depth, but to have an anthem *only* exist in the background is also counter to the philosophy of the piece.

Probably what the plan will be is to stick all of the anthems into a playlist and listen to them ad nauseum for the two weeks following band camp. Next would be to spend a day in a very quiet room or at a park or go on a walk or something and let the ideas buzz of their own accord around in my head, and then spend the next day with staff paper, a pencil with a very big eraser, and a computer, and see what manages to come out. If what comes out seems promising, i move forward with the piece. If what comes out seems strained and difficult and stupid, i start over.

So okay, now here’s what i want to do:

1. Start a Hangouts on Air broadcast in Room A on computer A. Something that’s roughly 5-10 seconds in length.
2. Quickly move Hangouts on Air broadcasting set up to Room B that has computer B in it that is broadcasting the Hangout publicly.
3. Train Computer A’s camera on Computer B’s screen, and feed in the audio of Computer B into Computer A. So now the live broadcast is picking up the 5-1o second delayed thing that i had done earlier – which will recursively add upon itself both in video and audio format ad infinitum.

I wonder what would happen.

Very recently google came out with an iPhone app. it’s a pretty basic no-nonsense app that i like much better than the facebook app for loading time alone. But probably the coolest feature of the app is the ability to see an incoming stream of what is defined as “nearby”. As in, g+ figures out where you’re located, grabs public posts from the nearby area, and puts into its own custom stream.

So okay, g+. now i want that or a better variant of that available on the web version.

A version of this already happens in limited ways on fb. i have a slice of 100ish friends from PA or who used to be from PA, and at certain times, say, during a Philadelphia Phillies game or an Eagles game or similar, my fb wall explodes with people’s reactions to what’s happening in real time. It’s a strange “mob mentality” capture on the internet which at first i found to be one of the negatives of fb but now i kind of like even if it can be annoying when it’s something i don’t give two flips about.

The UI i picture is something like this: you click on a “map stream” button and it takes you to a google map with a circle on it defaulted by your current location and a radius/diameter that’s defined by you. Click OK or Submit and it gives you a stream of any public g+ posts within that circle. Those defaults should probably be saved as “home stream” or something. But then i want to be able to grab any slice of a google map in a circle and do the same thing. Suppose i live in new orleans and i just heard about an earthquake in san francisco, or i’m a big SF 49ers fan and a game is going on. I want to be able to go to my map stream, highlight a circle around the bay area, and see what people in that area have been posting about it.

It has some great novelty value, but also has some meetup/gathering potential if, say, i’m looking for something to do in town or generally want to know if there’s anything happening and want to get a flavor of that from people not necessarily in my own circles. So i use map stream to grab my area, see if anyone is posting about happenings, start a conversation about it or just show up to where the action is.

The other interesting potential is what happens if i select the entire world map during, say, coverage of Obama doing an international speech or during the World Cup. There’s fascinating potential there to observe and analyze social networking behavior that right now isn’t easy to capture using twitter or facebook.

Area streams/feeds are an area that i feel is an untapped potential, one of the more interesting things uncaptured by the current social network paradigm. How about it g+ developers? Seems easy enough to implement since you already do it on the iPhone app. Develop that puppy.

As a musician, composer, and educator, i’ve put a lot of thought into the audience of my craft, and recently those thoughts have led me to a radical sort of idea involving audience expectation. Most entertainment contexts these days have either a casual approach to audience protocol or have a more interactive/reactive approach to audience protocol. Sports crowds are a constant chatter of conversation and encourage loud reactions and interactions on big plays. Movie crowds are generally pretty quiet, but it’s still not unusual to get a loud reaction when one is warranted, particularly for comedies. Well-designed marching athletics in all of its forms have “reaction moments” built into the design so that the audience can applaud or whoop and holler if need be. Music concerts, whether big acts in stadiums or small acts in bars are set for a casual atmosphere where people are able to mill about, order drinks, &c.

In contrast, art music concerts have an implied audience expectation and protocol of “sit still and pay attention until we say that it’s okay to clap.” It forces the live concert-goer to completely internalize reaction until protocol dictates the time when it can come out, and to a degree even the manner in which it can come out. While i think that there’s a lot of valid reasons why this is set in place, there’s a part of me that can’t help but think that this rigid structure is part of the reason why these concerts lack appeal for newer audiences. It feels like an old-fashioned aesthetic that lacks context and thus is in its own bubble, which, while once had the strength to stand on its own, is now shrinking and will eventually dissolve into nothing.

Pitched like that, it should be fairly obvious what my idea is: change the protocol. Create a new paradigm for audience expectation for those sorts of concerts to be more casual such as the jazz club bar or the wedding reception band, or more deliberately interactive at times such as the winter drumline/drum corps show, or maybe even completely free such as the big rock concert venue or sports event.

Clearly there are challenges with this sort of shift in audience protocol, particularly as it relates to certain types of concert literature. Some pieces demand a concentrated audience awareness to achieve the maximum effect and would not fare well in a more casual environment, either for the performers or for the audience. I think overall there would have to be some experimentation with different pieces to determine how casual of an atmosphere it could support and the nature of that atmosphere. A couple of years ago the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra did a “concert in the park” deal in honor of a local supermarket opening. The supermarket cooked a huge barbecue and was selling beer/wine/liquor while the LPO played in an ampitheatre area where people could eat and listen casually to the music being played. That worked for that concert because it was free, it was a pops concert, and it was in a large open park area. You wouldn’t be able to pull that off with, say, Adagio for Strings.

More to the point, I’m not necessarily suggesting that the paradigm needs to shift for established works (although i’m not closed to that idea either); it has more to do with new compositions and new composers making an adjustment to how they compose with that paradigm shift in mind, how that changes the nature or character of a piece of music when you plan to write for that sort of environment in the first place. Suppose you have a chamber group of fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, and there’s a section where you highlight an instrument or a duet of the instruments. A jazz club atmosphere would build in them being put more in the spotlight and there potentially being an outro transition moment that could be filled with applause. A large ensemble hit moment could lend to more stage energy from the performers that could support the audience reacting to that moment without it detracting from the music. Thinking about that sort of environment creates a different compositional aesthetic.

Maybe it’s a square-peg-fits-into-the-circle-hole sort of thing, but i think it would be neat to put on series of concerts like that, programmed with a bunch of pieces whether new or old that allows for and encourages the audience to have more freedom, and then gauge its success by the hype, the sales, the reactions. it would surely be awkward at first, but i think it has the potential to gain momentum and change/reinvent the concert paradigm in a way that would resonate more with current audiences and thus maybe provide a context in which the older concert paradigm could generate new life.

Maybe i just need to become a rock star.

At our workplace, the motivation for switching to automatic paper towel dispensers were touted as helping to “go green”, the new term for environmental friendliness. I suspect that it had more to do with cost-cutting as i imagine that they theoretically save the company money by decreasing paper towel use, or else the company would have bought all of us Hybrids or something.

But that’s besides the point. As i was thinking about the phenomenon of the automatic paper towel dispenser the other day, i thought about the next logical and brilliant step to take: automatic toilet paper dispensers. As opposed to having an individual dip into the toilet paper roll for whatever they’re worth, hit a button and it rations out the amount that is theoretically all you need to wipe. Maybe there’d have to be two buttons, one for “small amount” versus one for “large” amount to cover various needs.

Which sounds ridiculous, but so do automatic paper towel dispensers to me, even after all this time. Maybe we need to take cues from Demolition Man and figure out how to use the three seashells.

here’s my idea:

everyone who decides that they’re going to vote has to take a comprehensive aptitude test. but not an aptitude test like the GRE or the SAT or something that’s just based on intelligence. it’s a much broader test that encompasses other things as well – mechanical things, house sorts of stuff, understanding of politics, awareness of issues, that sort of thing.

weight the individual questions based on some sort of predetermined system (as in answering 2+2=? isn’t as impressive as 13! mod 4). Then, based on the individual’s final result, weight how much their vote counts towards the final tally to determine who takes office. that way, someone who doesn’t know what end of the pencil is used to fill in the little boxes will only influence the vote a little.

there’d have to be some guidelines. it can’t just be an isolated measure of intelligence or practical things or awareness of social issues – placing too much emphasis on any of those things individually would influence the presidency too heavily. a balance needs to be struck, determined and governed by a well-picked council.

this way, everyone can still vote, which i think is important to the democratic process, but it eliminates the total free-for-all nature of the voting system being completely equal.

and then of course there’d have to be an air-tight auditing process to prove that it was all done fairly and no one breached the system and all that.