Link to composition news! Plus ... more avian Ink...?

I just sent out another edition of my e-mail blast, which has lots of lovely news in it, particularly recording news. You can read it here (and by the way, for the moment, you can subscribe to it here):

Composer Melissa Dunphy's Super-Exciting, Very Occasional News, Issue #3

But for convenience's sake, here are some of the audiovisual elements:






Take note: Together is being performed TONIGHT at 8PM in Newport Beach, California, at the Choral Arts Initiative inaugural concert: details here.

You should also all go read this issue of Sound American, because I'm quite proud of having been interviewed, given the company I'm in.

###

On a completely different topic: they say tattoos are addictive.

Yeeeeaaah, maybe.

Last year, I got this done by Cindy at No Ka Oi Tiki Tattoo just south of South Street (I'm in her gallery too!):

You can read all about the significance of the image in these blog posts, but the short of it is that these are noisy miner birds as depicted in John Gould's The Birds of Australia. I've been thinking about getting something on my right upper arm for a while. I wasn't really sure what I wanted, or even if it would be similarly ornithological, but while doing some idle browsing on the topic of Gould this week, I came across some interesting information.

Edward Lear — yes, he of "Owl and the Pussycat" fame, though my favorite of his poems is "The Dong with a Luminous Nose" — was once an ornithological illustrator. In fact, John Gould employed Lear (without crediting him) for many years to help him with his publications, and Lear taught Gould's wife how to make the lithographs for Gould's works, and drew all of the backgrounds. Lear's own ornithological specialty was parrots; he would spend hours at the London Zoo's Parrot House drawing birds from life, including several Australian species. I sought out his lithographs, and I think they are breathtaking. Frankly, he is a far better artist than Gould or his wife. Here is a selection from his own book The Parrots, but this one is my favorite, which was included in The Natural History of Parrots by Prideaux John Selby (1836):

(I've cleaned up the colors and altered some of the background.)

When I was growing up in Queensland, one of my favorite zoo-type places to go was Currumbin Sanctuary, whose main draw is scheduled rainbow lorikeet feedings that attract hundreds and hundreds of birds, all happy to land on your head and shoulders for a taste of nectar. Later, in Sydney, I lived for a drunken period with far too many college friends in a two-bedroom third-storey apartment with a balcony. Every morning just after dawn, huge flocks of rainbow lorikeets would crowd the railing of our balcony and screech like it was judgement day. It was deafening. I still cringe to remember the effect on my poor hungover head. As much as I swore and threw objects in their direction at the time, I've missed them. The closest thing to such a striking bird here in Philadelphia is the cardinal, and they don't have nearly as much personality.

When Matt and I visited Australia again in 2006, I took him to Taronga Zoo, where the wild lorikeets are so tame they will perch on your hand at the cafe and go for packets of sugar.

They are so numerous and destructive in Australia that they've been designated a pest by the government (similar to the noisy miner — apparently I have a cheeky soft spot for native Australian birds that do the opposite of become extinct after urbanization). Despite this, I was shocked when I came to America and saw two rainbow lorikeets in a pet store in Central PA. They looked utterly miserable, huddled in a corner of their cage with dull feathers. It didn't seem right.

Anyway, I'll let the idea sit for a few weeks at least before I decide.

 

ISSUE #3, JUNE 2013 | www.mormolyke.com View this email in your browser

June 19, 2013 Listen to the orchestral version of Tesla's Pigeon for free! And more...

Hooray for summer! I'm supposed to be working fulltime on composing my dissertation/opera Ayn, but things keep happening, and you should know about them, because they are pretty cool. And letting you know about the happening things is a great way for me to procrastinate, of course. Shhh. Newsworthy things: TIME SENSITIVE! Tonight (June 19), a piece I wrote for the Whitman College Chamber Singers last year called Together will be given its professional premiere in Newport Beach, California, by the Choral Arts Initiative, a brand new ensemble dedicated to performing new music. The text of the piece is taken from Acts 2, but lest you think that a Bible setting is out of character for me, I should perhaps give you a taste of the opening lines: And all they that believed were together and had all things common. Their possessions and goods they sold and divided them to all, according as every one had need... Needless to say, I think you may find a certain political angle contained therein. Click here for details on the performance and to purchase tickets.   If you're nowhere near LA or you'd like a sneak peek of Together, I recently updated my Bandcamp page with a recording created by Matthew Curtis (a member of Chanticleer when they sang Omaha Beach last year) through his venture Choral Tracks (highly recommended to other composers, by the way!). You can listen to it for free:   Also available now on Bandcamp: the orchestral version of Tesla's Pigeon! As detailed in my last newsletter and recent Kickstarter campaign, this was recorded in a reading session one afternoon in late April by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and soprano Jessica Lennick under the baton of Kensho Watanabe, and the audio is now available: There's also a YouTube video available of Tim Ribchester and Jess performing the piano-vocal version of Tesla's Pigeon in New York the week before.   But wait, there's more! Want to hear my incredibly geeky solo violin and Nintendo track, which was premiered last month by Anti-Social Music? Theme and Variables: Scallops and Bollocks for Tea (An Ode to CSIRAC) was recently recorded by Paul Arnold of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and you can hear that for free on Bandcamp too:   If you want some reading material while you listen to all that music, I am pretty proud to have been interviewed last month by Sound American for their "Philadelphia Issue." Apparently I'm a "voice of Philadelphia." Not bad. You can hear me spout off about dodecaphony, feminism and the satanic parking authority by clicking here.   One more thing! If you enjoy gorgeous aerial acrobatics (who doesnt!?), Tangle Movement Arts will be performing in the HOT! Festival in NYC on July 5, and one of their pieces will be choreographed to my work for solo voice and looper, June â€” listen to it here. The text for June was written by Tangle Arts founder Lauren Rile Smith, who is also a wonderful poet. Check out the performance â€” their work is breathtaking. But enough! Back to slaving over a hot keyboard. Keep in touch! Cheers, Melissa Dunphy

Copyright © 2013 Mormolyke Press, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences

Marital bliss

(Yeah, I didn't blog for a few weeks, and now all the bloggable items in my head are stacked up in overflowing piles like the contents of a hoarder's house. I have some composition-related news stuff, but I'll save that for another day.)

Last year, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of falling in love, Matt and I went back to New Orleans and recreated a bunch of our goofy snapshots from 2002.

I have been married to my incredible, amazing husband Matt for nearly ten years. Ten yeeeeears. Good god. He ought to get a medal. Recent planning of our anniversary celebration has reminded me just how unusual our situation is among our peers, many of whom are only getting married now, a decade behind us. We, on the other hand, were more or less children; when I hear about people in their early twenties getting engaged, my first reaction is always, "That's so young!" before I realize that we were only 23 when we took the plunge. ["You Know What Turns an Unstable Relationship into a Stable One? Not a Wedding Ring."] It was different for us, though. We had to get married just to give our relationship a chance because we lived on different continents. Before I met Matt, acquiring a husband was never a priority. I was even slightly averse to marriage as an unnecessary institution. Matt and I still laugh to remember our attitude when we got engaged: Honey, I love you so much, I will even marry you if that's what it takes. But against all the odds and no doubt many expectations, our relationship, sealed by wedding vows, has been and still is the most wonderful thing ever, and the most important thing in my life; together we have gone on the coolest adventures, worked on insane projects, weathered disastrous emotional crises, grown closer and grown up (and we continue to grow), and never stopped being best friends. It sounds wretched cheesy when I type it out, but it's true.

We also haven't had kids, and neither of us are really looking to have any in the near future, which is another thing that sets us apart from most people we know. This has been on my mind lately too — ten years ago, when I similarly felt no maternal urges, I figured that if I were ever to change my mind, it would be around now. I check myself ever other week, wondering if the desire to procreate is down there somewhere, hiding under my guilt for avoiding the cat litter perhaps, but I can see no sign of it. I'm happy with my life. I'm working through an annoying depression that has hung around for a few years, but my external life is terrific. I feel no need to change it by introducing a child into it, and I don't think a child would improve it. And I like kids. I really do. What can I say? Jesus suffered the little children, and he didn't have kids either.

Mmmmmm. Cake.

Anyway, for our tin anniversary in September, we're throwing a big party and playing some live music as Up Your Cherry for our friends and family. There will be some guest stars too — Jess Lennick and I are possibly pairing up to present an Ayn-themed duo, Inverse Phase might be spinning some tracks, Jordan Smith of Tears for Agnes might be flying in from Japan, and Matt's been jamming with a few of his friends from work who may or may not be ready to play out by then. So far we've decided to hold it at PhilaMOCA, which is right down the road from our house, and we're thinking of asking our favorite neighborhood restaurant Honey's Sit 'n Eat if they'll provide catering (so local! hipsters++!). I also need to find a good cake source. Can't have an anniversary party without cake. For our wedding, we did multiple cheesecakes: plain, white chocolate, strawberry, and Snickers. It may have been the best part of the day.

I'm really excited about all this because planning fun things with Matt is, well, fun, and it gives us (me, mostly) a reason to devote a bunch of time to writing and rehearsing Up Your Cherry songs too. It's difficult right now for me to set aside time for UYC because I have the pressure and weight of an unfinished dissertation opera forcing itself downward on my mind and forming some pretty gnarly guilt diamonds.

Another handy spousal nice-time distraction from the opera is the redesign of my website(s), which I'm pushing forward from later this summer because some horrid evil scripty nonsense has somehow been injected into various pages of my current site(s), and it's easier to nuke it all from orbit now than clean it up knowing that I'd soon be changing everything anyway. I bounced some ideas off Matt this past weekend, and I'm excited about the new format I want. This week I'm going to do some freeform design brainstorming on my own (it's actually more like scrapbooking) and hopefully come up with some mockups in Photoshop for Matt to begin to implement. I'm so grateful he's not only very able, but apparently willing, even though this is technically work for him. Every time I come back to website coding after a hiatus, I am a cross-eyed idiot, and it takes forever to get my bearings. I used to make a point of relearning everything I'd forgotten and being extremely hands-on in the implementation process, but I've realized that's just me being a stupid control freak and having a chip on my shoulder about needing to know how to do everything for myself. If I never delegate, NOBODY CAN BE BETTER THAN ME AT ANYTHING EVER!!111! LETTING OTHER PEOPLE DO THINGS FOR ME IS EVIDENCE OF INCOMPETENCE!!11!!!!!11!!!! Thanks for that value, Mum, real helpful.

Last thing: a couple of weeks ago, Matt and I headed west to our old stomping region, Central PA, to attend the premiere of No Sanctuary, a fun film project I acted in back in 2005. Jake Stetler, the film's director, has been editing together the film whenever he's had the opportunity over the past eight years, and he was proud to be able to show it to an audience of friends and family at Ephrata's Main Theater. Our friend Kendall Whitehouse showed up as paparazzo:
 

No Sanctuary Premiere, a set by Kendall Whitehouse on Flickr.

Via Flickr: Cast, crew, and investors attend the premiere screening of Jake Stetler’s No Sanctuary 
at the Main Theater in Ephrata, PA on May 24, 2013.

I am a woman. I am a composer. I am a woman composer.

Being a female composer is weird for the simple reason that there aren't very many of us and we aren't all that visible. (Being a female composer of color is even weirder.)

I've been calling myself a composer for about six years now, and over that time, I've become more and more conscious of my gender, and to a lesser degree, my ethnicity. Maybe at first I was just so narcissistically excited to think of myself as a composer at all that I didn't notice my colleagues' background. Once I started taking notice, however, it became a game at new music concerts to survey all the composers forced to take those terrible awkward bows from the audience after their pieces have been performed (God, I hate taking those bows). And the result?

The vast majority of composers are white men of average build with brown hair and glasses.

I don't have a scientific survey, but a tally of the people around me suggests that this majority is upward of 80%. Sometimes gaggles of composers look so similar that I can easily imagine they are all siblings in some incredibly musical quiverfull family whose father only shoots Y-chromosome sperm.

Some composers are older and their brown hair has turned grey or white, and sometimes they wear contact lenses instead of glasses, but for the most part, this stereotype is confirmed over and over again. Very occasionally the composers are Hispanic or Asian, but they usually retain the characteristics of maleness and having average build and brown hair and glasses.

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with being an average-looking white guy with brown hair and glasses. They're not actively oppressing anyone just by being who they are. Nobody who fits this description should have to feel guilty about it. And obviously there are exceptions to this rule. But the stereotype applies to the point where I'm often left giggling at its absurd ubiquity.

So what the hell does this mean? We live in a world brimming with all kinds of gender (and racial) equality now, right?* Why aren't there more female composers around? Are the institutions sexist? Are the judging panels of composition contests and the programmers of concert series sexist?

I don't think they necessarily are, or at least, I don't think that's the real root of the problem. Institutions, judging panels, and programmers just exist in a world where the vast majority of all composers are already white men of average build with brown hair and glasses, and that majority isn't changing very quickly. How can you demonstrate equality between the sexes in any concert series when maybe one in ten composers out there are women?** You can't just pluck women at random from the street and ask them to compose some art music. It takes years of training, and of course, they have to want to do it in the first place.

And thus the problem is perpetuated because the example is very firmly set for younger generations: "Hey, kids! Composers look like white guys with brown hair and glasses. They've looked like this for 600 years, and they look the same way now."

When you're a child, you absorb all kinds of things about gender from the moment you start interacting with the world. Men are heroes, and women are princesses to be won. Men are doctors, and women are nurses. Alpha-male businessmen have ultra-feminine secretaries.

Quick: picture a firefighter. He's a man, right?

Quick: picture a professor. If you didn't think of an old white guy, you are a very unusual person.

Quick: picture a kindergarten teacher. If you didn't picture a woman, you are again a very unusual person.

I've worked with little kids a fair bit as a theater/acting educator, and something I notice about them is that you very rarely meet a little boy who wants to be a nurse or a teacher when he grows up. For whatever reason, little boys have been socialized to think of these jobs as unsuitable for them. You also don't find a lot of little girls wanting to be pilots or engineers or firefighters. Of course, when they grow older, they sometimes learn that these traditionally gendered careers are open to them after all, and they occasionally follow those paths. But still, over 90% of registered nurses are female. Over 80% of engineers are male.***

Now ask a musically literate child to think of ten composers. If she can name that many, how many do you think will be women? How many of the compositions that child has learned to play do you think are by women?

Knowing this, how many little girls do you think might want to be composers when they grow up? How many little girls even realize they can be composers? How many have even had the idea?

Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason that, despite being a musician all my life, I didn't even think about becoming a composer until I was 24, and I didn't call myself one until I was 26.

(Related: how many black children do you think want to be art music composers when they grow up? Funny story: like every other clunky-fingered beginner pianist, I learned The Entertainer as a child, but I am horrifically ashamed to admit I only found out last year that Scott Joplin was black. The internet didn't exist when I learned The Entertainer, I'd never seen a picture, and nobody ever mentioned to me that he was black, so by default, I had always pictured him as a white guy (probably wearing a boater hat). Shocked and mortified by my own ignorance, I informed my husband how dumb his wife was, and he had to admit that, until that moment, he also had not known that Scott Joplin was black, despite learning about ragtime in high school music class. Nobody had told him either.)

One of the pressures that I feel as a woman composer is my own desire to demonstrate to future generations of little girls that composers aren't just white men with brown hair and glasses. Even though most of them still are. The only way the demographics are going to change is if we go in at the ground level. We need young girls and boys to see that composition is not a gendered pursuit, not just by telling them so, but by showing them. We need a Girls Rock Philly organization for classical music — or maybe there would be a way to fit classical music into their mission? I don't know — I haven't approached them, though I absolutely love what they do. I really want to volunteer with them once my schedule allows i.e. after Ayn. I want to start a composition school for girls.

Maybe I'm doing myself no favors, but I don't feel it's enough for me to exist as a composer and forget about the "woman" part. I personally feel an obligation to be more visible if I can be, to make up for the fact that I'm such a minority, so that it's not such a fucking embarrassment to new music that all the composers taking a bow look exactly the same. With the situation as it is, women composers need to shine brighter than their abundant male counterparts so that eventually, one frabjous day, so many aspiring girls will take our place that we will be able to forget about the "woman" part. That day has not arrived. Yeah, this is problematic; that's a lot of pressure to place on current women composers. It makes things unequal for us. It contributes to the sense that in order to make it, we have to work twice as hard. It confirms the idea that the default majority can make it as individuals, but minority artists are forced to represent their entire group. But I'd rather do that than pretend there isn't an imbalance and do nothing, which is about as useful a solution as calling myself George and wearing a top hat. ("Hey kids! Composition is such a male pursuit, I had to become a man in order to do it!")

(Tangentially related: I think it would be really interesting to study how the demographics of forensic scientists, particularly forensic pathologists, have changed since the 1980's. I've mentioned this before: I watch a lot, I mean a lot of television detective shows, particularly police procedurals, and it seems like virtually every TV forensic pathologist is a woman now. I enrolled in med school in 1997 only because I wanted to be a forensic pathologist (and quit when I realized there weren't enough jobs in Australia in that field); I have no doubt now that this desire was in part inspired by The X-Files and Patricia Cornwell, and there are even more fictional examples of female FP's now. Has fictional representation in the media done anything to affect gender distribution in forensic pathology more than other medical fields? I'd be so curious to know.)

I am woman, hear me ... make woman music

Here's a confession. When I first decided to become a composer, I bristled at the idea that I was a "female composer." I felt there was a stereotype about the kind of music that a female composer would write, and I didn't want to fit that mold. What can I say? I hadn't really thought deeply about the reasons behind my views. I had just finished a long fling with industrial music, which is deeply gendered and whose fans can be quite sexist when explaining their musical preferences ("I don't like female-fronted bands."). I wanted to make it in a man's world writing MANLY MALE MUSIC like all those MAN COMPOSERS I had admired all my life. The ultimate expression of (second-wave) feminism, right?

Of course, this brings up a huge, touchy question. Do female composers and male composers write different kinds of music? I don't claim to have any kind of definitive answer. We are almost certainly socialized very early on to believe that there is some level of gender differentiation in music. Society still tends to squeeze everyone and everything into categories of feminine and masculine. Boys are given trucks to play with and encouraged to listen to loud tough music. Girls are given dolls to play with and encouraged to listen to pretty soothing music. By the time you reach middle school, there are at least some boundaries set, sad as they may be. A boy would probably catch hell for being into female pop bands. A girl is flying a tomboy flag if she's into heavy metal. A lot of children start throwing around slurs when they see peers not behaving in a strictly heteronormative way. Children learn to conform, no matter how much we ask them to be brave.

I brought this discussion up on a Facebook thread the other day, and a friend made a comment that got me thinking:

But do you find it worth exploring, like an evolutionary psychologist might, whether there are some maybe biological underpinnings for the different sorts of music they're likely to write and play?

My first impulse was to yell NO!! We are all forced to conform! We're all the same deep down! But then I wondered. And I remembered: biologically, women and men do perceive things differently. Take color. Women see more yellow in green and more red in orange than men do. Far more men are colorblind, but now we've discovered that some women are tetrachromats and see 100 million more colors than men. Where sound is concerned, women have a faster and more negative reaction to a baby's cry than men, to encourage/force them to look after their squalling young (a nasty evolutionary trick that helps explain why I become highly anxious on airplanes when a baby starts screaming, while Matt takes it perfectly calmly). Along the same lines, men and women have very different sensitivities to sounds, at least when sleeping. A crying baby is the sound most likely to wake a woman. The sound isn't even in the top ten for men, who are more likely to react to a car alarm.

If our senses are calibrated differently, wouldn't that have some kind of influence on our artistic taste? What kind of influence? (Maybe I don't like some types of dissonant music because they sound too much like babies crying? she ponders facetiously) It's a very complicated question, and any answer would be less than universal. But I have to wonder: if there were more women composers, would art music sound different? At some level, do women feel, like I once did, that they should make an effort to write like men, because male composers set all the examples we study in school?

Maybe these are stupid questions. I don't know. All I know for sure is that, six years ago, I had internalized some horrible idea that my music shouldn't be too "feminine," whatever the hell that means, because somehow "feminine" was bad. "Feminine" wouldn't be taken seriously enough by the art music world. People would roll their eyes and dismiss me as a wishy-washy woman composer. I hate that I held this attitude. It wasn't something at the forefront of my mind, I didn't express it in any overt way, but it was there. Ugh ugh ugh.

So here it is. I am a woman composer. I don't set out to write "feminine" music, but if anyone were to find it feminine, including myself, fine. Good. We have had 600 years of music written by men, 600 years of being told that that is what art music is. If—if—our music is different in any way, we shouldn't shy away from that. We shouldn't deny our gender.

And if we write "masculine" music, that's good too. But it's not better.

Maybe I'm the only person in the world to have internalized these ideas to the point where I have to talk myself out of them in a therapeutic blog rant. I doubt it, though.

*Hahahaha.
**Without affirmative action, that is (OOGER BOOGER).
***Not even getting into women of color here because it's too depressing.

ISSUE #2, APRIL 2013 | www.mormolyke.com View this email in your browser

April 22, 2013 Woah, I have enough super exciting news to justify a newsletter this month too.

Heya! It's only been a month since the last newsletter, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that I have accrued yet more interesting and unexpected musical things to announce. Newsworthy things: OK, the first thing isn't so unexpected because I spoiled it in the previous newsletter. Tesla's Pigeon is being given its New York premiere by Jessica Lennick and Tim Ribchester  tonight! (That's April 22, in case you're one of those lucky people who isn't compelled to check their e-mail every day.) The free-admission event will be held at Christ & St Stephen's Church (120 West 69th St) in Manhattan at 8PM. If you're in the area, come out and say hi! And I mean that -- come and find me at the show and say hello. Click here for more details.   Here's a big one that you probably weren't expecting because it was super-secret news up till now: I can officially announce that I have been selected as the 2013/14 composer for the Choral Arts Laboratory held by the award-winning choir Volti in San Francisco. Yay! They'll be flying me out in October to workshop a new commission in progress, which they will premiere next Spring. This is a huge honor, and a rare opportunity to write something truly adventurous for a choral group with mad skills. Trust me, composers don't get chances like this very often.   A couple of years ago, the super-fun and eclectic new music collective Anti-Social Music premiered a piece I wrote called Handshake that was rejected by a, shall we say, less adventurous ensemble who thought it wasn't Serious enough for them. As in, they wouldn't even read it. Seriously, ASM did a smashing job, and the piece remains one of my favorite of my own compositions, despite the fact that Very Serious Music People are sometimes left scratching their heads. Anyway, earlier this year I wrote a piece for solo violin and "tape" (I don't know why we still call it tape. I don't even remember the last time I even saw a tape.) that falls into the same rough attitudinal category, and ASM will be premiering that on May 9 in Brooklyn. It's called Theme and Variables: Scallops and Bollocks for Tea, and the "tape" portion was made with Nintendo Entertainment System VST instruments and a recreated sample of the first ever computer-generated music: a snippet of the Colonel Bogey March performed by an Australian computer known as CSIRAC. It is Fun. And of course, as I mentioned in my last newsletter, Tesla's Pigeon is being recorded by the Curtis Symphony next week. And when that's all over, I have an opera to finish this summer. It's a busy time! Here's hoping I get to see you at a concert sometime soon... (like, tonight, if possible). Cheers, Melissa Dunphy

Copyright © 2013 Mormolyke Press, All rights reserved.

Eat, Compose, Love

Bless me, Blogger, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last entry.

Right this instant I am exhausted.

At long last, for about a month now, I have had only one project on my plate: Ayn. I have been on this earth for nearly 33 years, and this singularity of purpose is unprecedented. But for some stupid reason, I feel more tired for it. Perhaps, with less noise, I am able to feel the accumulated weariness for the first time. In any case, I'm making progress on the opera — slow progress, but progress nevertheless — but when the notes come out sounding like garbage because my brain has run out of juice for the day, I find myself totally confused and lost by the lack of other items on my to-do list. I pace around mindlessly like a broken Roomba. I don't think I've ever dealt with feeling like this before. It's an experiment.

A couple of old projects have managed to demand my attention recently, however. The most notable news is that Tesla's Pigeon will be performed in New York City next month, thanks to this wildly successful ongoing kickstarter campaign I launched ten days ago:



It's a little overwhelming to receive so much support from friends near and far — and even a few total strangers. And since the campaign also introduces my current project publicly, the pressure is on for Ayn. I have expectations to fulfill, theirs and mine.

Meanwhile, the Tesla's Pigeon concert will be at 7:30PM on April 22 at Christ & Saint Stephens Church. I'll post more about it closer to the date.

Then, exactly a week later, Jess and the Curtis Symphony will record my orchestration of Tesla's Pigeon, which I was feverishly arranging when I wrote my last blog entry. I'm pretty excited to hear it played, even if it does create some non-Ayn noise in my head. I spent rather too much time in January learning how to bind books so I could make a hardcover score, which kicks some serious arse over the spiral binding that is the standard:



^^ These are also available as a reward on the Kickstarter campaign.

This afternoon, the Kennett Symphony Orchestra and Children's Chorus will give the second of two children's concerts featuring my brand spanking new revision of Jack and the Beanstalk at my alma mater West Chester University; last summer, I tore into the first edition, ripped out and abridged some movements, interpolated some new songs (including the most ridiculously catchy number I've ever written in my life, "These Beans"), added some lyrics to existing instrumental melodies, and rearranged the whole thing for chamber orchestra. It's shorter, but I think it's way better. Judging from the post-performance reactions last week, the kids seem to enjoy it, which is about the best compliment a composer can get; kids that young are unabashedly honest, and they're difficult to fool. Of course, everyone is nuts over "These Beans," but unfortunately, I can't let you hear a recording because of the stipulations of the Musician's Union. I might have some choice words on that matter in a later post.

Captain Samuels Speaks to the Sea! made its UK debut in February at the Two Rivers Festival, the first time any piece of mine has been performed over the pond as far as I know. I am surprisingly proud of that piece. I started listening to it the other day and found myself quite liking it, and I played it all the way through, good heavens. I know that sounds a bit batty, but I don't do much playback of my finished pieces because I start to pick at them and want to change them, and I'd rather write new stuff.



On a non-musical note, last month Matt and I got the results of our DNA test from 23andMe. If you have $99 to spare, I highly recommend it; fascinating stuff, especially for someone like me descended from immigrants who tend to leave the past behind and have no interest in genealogy. As far as recent ethnic background is concerned, I didn't find out anything I didn't already know: my mother is a Chinese as they come, and my father is as Greek as they come. The only surprise was 2% Italian heritage on my father's side, which really isn't all that surprising at all. Of more interest is the data from further back: I have 3.1% Neanderthal DNA, which puts me in the 98th percentile. I thought this was pretty badass until Matt looked at his DNA profile: he has 3.2% Neanderthal DNA, placing him in the 99th percentile. That's about as close as we come to being related.

Orchestrating Tesla's Pigeon, Part 2

I took the day off today. Matt and I ran errands and visited Philly Electric Wheels to try out one of their new electric bikes I've been eyeing up to replace my old clunky 68-pound eZip*. I would like to get back into commuting on two wheels (hopefully without being physically attacked or hit by a car) because I am quite possibly the most unfit able-bodied person on the planet. Like, I test-rode the bike -- an electric pedal assist bike -- for maybe two blocks and back, and now my quads hurt. What.

This week has reminded me why I procrastinate so heavily before working on a composition. It takes over everything. I lost five pounds in five days because I forgot to eat and my brain was burning fuel overtime. I forgot how to interact with people. I slept poorly, woke early, and went straight from my bed to my office like a zombie. I neglected my husband. I let some of my plants die. I didn't do any housework.

Instead, I threw together a 55-page orchestral score. Thank god for Sibelius keyboard shortcuts; even as good as I am with them, the wrist on my mouse hand is sore. Yesterday I tried to take a break. Do something else! my body screamed at me. You cannot sustain this level of focus! What I ended up doing was cutting some 100lb paper to 10 by 13 inches in order to eventually print parts on them, and after about an hour of guillotining, I went back to working on the score.

Today I finally tore myself away, and now I don't want to go back for a while. But I'm seeing my teacher on Thursday, so I'm sure that will suck me back in to endless tweaking and formatting, and I'll have ECU tendonitis before you know it.

Speaking of Tesla, tomorrow I have to get up at the crack of dawn and drive myself and my long-suffering husband to the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan for the inaugural Tesla Memorial Conference. Tesla's star sure is on the rise, and it's neat that I'm apparently a part of that. I'm giving a short talk at the 5:00PM session, but I'll be hanging around all day. Hey, maybe they'll let me go in his old room.

Oh, by the way, there are some moments in the orchestration which I am REALLY REALLY happy about. The Wagnerian harmonies in song VII are going to sound so freaking boss on brass, and song VI was basically written for harp; I barely had to make any adjustments (although those adjustments took forever, because I had to remember how harp pedaling works).

Of course, the *real* reason I'm working this hard is because I'm procrastinating Ayn. Sigh.

* The Fast4Ward Edge, if you're interested. This would be the most expensive bike I've ever owned by a factor of 5.

Orchestrating Tesla's Pigeon

I've been talking idly about arranging Tesla's Pigeon for orchestra for a long time. Ever since writing it, I've clearly known which instruments are supposed to be playing each line. Maybe this has something to do with what a crap pianist I am; even when I'm writing for piano, I'm not really writing for piano.

Anyway, I started by sitting down this weekend with this awesome score of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition that I found in my room. I have no idea how it got there -- did someone give it to me? Did I buy it one day knowing I'd need it? At any rate, I pulled it out along with the piano score, only to discover that BY GOD these Eulenburg geniuses have included the original piano in the orchestral score for reference. Modern convenience. So great. Thank you, whatever unseen force put this score on my shelf.

The solstice is past, and I can feel my body and brain slowly turning toward the spring and seeing light at the end of a seasonally depressed tunnel. It's been a nasty slump this winter. The one "good" thing about depression is that it sometimes precipitates very intense emotional reactions -- to music, for example. So long as I'm not out in public or trying to drive straight, I appreciate them. I listened to Pictures at an Exhibition by myself with my handy Eulenburg Edition score on Sunday, and by the time I walked past the Great Gate of Kiev, I had completely lost it. I was literally sobbing. Sobbing! I mean, sure, I love that piece. I played it with QYO back in the day, and most of the pieces I played in my mid-teens made a huge impression. But: heaving sobs ... I haven't had that happen during a piece since I accidentally caught the Alpine Symphony on NPR back in 2008. Funnily enough, I played that with QYO too. Probably something to be said about that.

God, Ravel is good.

My hope is that I will have it orchestrated by the time school starts next week, and that the Curtis Orchestra will read it this semester. With Jess Lennick on pipes, naturally. I've made a cracking start: all the main stuff has been parceled out to the appropriate instruments, and now I just have to embroider. Oh, and create parts, I guess. Ugh.

I am heading to bed with this Eulenberg score. It's even a convenient bed-reading size. Such a fan.

Elegy for a Soprano

As you can probably tell, I've been doing an awful lot of Ayn reading these past few weeks; I realized there are some slippery things about the material and the dialogue and the characters' voices that I need to get a handle on before I can continue with the opera.

One of the books I whipped through was The Ayn Rand Cult, which was a fun read (even if there were a few weird misspellings like "Dagney" and some stretchy conclusions and assumptions):



I can't seem to definitively find Jeff Walker, a Canadian journalist, on an online social medium where I can casually interact with him, which is a surprising and a little disappointing, because if nothing else, I want to thank him for alerting me to the existence of Kay Nolte Smith's novel Elegy for a Soprano, which I cannot believe I didn't know about until now. That will teach me to stick to the non-fiction shelves.




Blurb:

THE DEATH OF A DIVA

Dinah Mitchell is saddened when she learns her favorite opera star, Vardis Wolf, has been poisoned - especially when she discovers that the woman behind the beautiful voice was her natural mother. Dinah journeys into the dark world of genius, driven to find out the truth about the singer's life ... and death.

Why is this so exciting? I hear you ask.
From the wiki of the author, Kay Nolte Smith:

She was for a time friendly with the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, who was her leading literary and philosophical influence... Smith launched her literary career after her separation from the Ayn Rand circle... Her novel Elegy for a Soprano is a roman a clef inspired by Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and the circle around them.

OH SHIT WHAT.

So I bought the book on Amazon, and I hardly dared to hope, but YES YES YES the stand in for Ayn Rand is the eponymous soprano! OMG SO PERFECT! She's like Rand crossed with Callas. As the wiki suggests, other lead characters including a very obviously drawn pseudo-Frank, pseudo-Nathaniel, and pseudo-Barbara, and a possible pseudo-Leonard.

AND HOLY SHIT the novel opens with Vardis/Ayn singing Salome, and of course the whole story is soaked in opera. So freaking perfect. It's also an easy-reading page-turner, especially for someone like me who has a thing for mystery novels, and it takes an unexpectedly moving left turn into the Holocaust at the end.

In case you couldn't tell, my Ayn is also a soprano. I feel quite validated that someone who actually knew her would also portray her as a soprano in pseudo-fiction.

What the hell kind of music does Richard Halley write, anyway?

Last week I read Atlas Shrugged, and I have so, so many things to say (or rather "scream" as EVERYONE IN THE BOOK DOES, CONSTANTLY) about so, so many things, but as a composer, I wanted to point this one out in particular.

There is, remarkably, a composer woven into the narrative named Richard Halley. Although we don't know the exact nature of his music, it is evidently so wonderful and heroic that a mere melody written by him, whistled by a stranger completely without context, transports hero industrialists into ecstasies of delight that cause them to extrapolate an entire orchestration in their imagination. No, really, that happens.

Later, we get to meet Richard Halley, who has withdrawn completely from the world and is hiding out in Galt's Gulch, much to the delight of fangirl Dagny. He furnishes her and us with an explanation for his disappearance (see below for TL;DR, because omg writing):

"I would have forgiven men for my struggle," said Richard Halley. "It was their view of my success that I could not forgive. I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow. That was what I had told myself through all those years —except on some nights, when I could neither wait nor believe any longer, when I cried 'why?' but found no answer. Then, on the night when they chose to cheer me, I stood before them on the stage of a theater, thinking that this was the moment I had struggled to reach, wishing to feel it, but feeling nothing. I was seeing all the other nights behind me, hearing the 'why?' which still had no answer—and their cheers seemed as empty as their snubs. If they had said, 'Sorry to be so late, thank you for waiting'—I would have asked for nothing else and they could have had anything I had to give them. But what I saw in their faces, and in the way they spoke when they crowded to praise me, was the thing I had heard being preached to artists—only I had never believed that anyone human could mean it. They seemed to say that they owed me nothing, that their deafness had provided me with a moral goal, that it had been my duty to struggle, to suffer, to bear—for their sake—whatever sneers, contempt, injustice, torture they chose to inflict upon me, to bear it in order to teach them to enjoy my work, that this was their rightful due and my proper purpose. And then I understood the nature of the looter-in-spirit, a thing I had never been able to conceive. I saw them reaching into my soul, just as they reach into Mulligan's pocket, reaching to expropriate the value of my person, just as they reach to expropriate his wealth—I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters—I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who'd acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs. . . . It was that night that I took the oath never to let them hear another note of mine.

(TL;DR I suffered for a long time because my music was so innovative that nobody liked it. Then one day, I achieved acclaim with one of my pieces. But while they were cheering, the audience didn't once apologize for not liking my music before! Instead they acted like it was my job to teach them how to enjoy my music! They thought I was writing my music for them! Those looters! I will never let them hear my music again!)

Well! Let's put aside what I might think of this attitude for a moment, because I am clearly an immoral moocher-lover. Given that Ayn was writing this in the 1940's and 1950's, one might assume that she is portraying a composer of modern music, right? It makes sense. I mean, if anyone could be accused of writing music that audiences had to be taught to enjoy, it would be the Second Viennese School (and I think it could be argued that audiences still haven't learned to appreciate them). And "Who Cares If [They] Listen" anyway. So in my head, Halley was a mighty expressionist. Let's hear a hearty cheer from the atonalists out there! Ayn Rand, for all her faults, is championing your music and your struggle!

You can guess where this is going.

What's this? From the book What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (good lord):

A brief word about so-called modern music: no further research or scientific discoveries are required to know with full, objective certainty that it is not music. The proof lies in the fact that music is the product of periodic vibrations -- and therefore, the introduction of nonperiodic variations (such as the sounds of street traffic or of machine gears or of coughs and sneezes), i.e., of noise, into an allegedly musical composition eliminates it automatically from the realm of art and of consideration. But a word of warning in regard to the vocabulary of the perpetrators of such "innovation" is in order: they spout a great deal about the necessity of "conditioning" your ear to an appreciation of their "music." Their notion of conditioning is unlimited by reality and by the law of identity; man, in their view, is infinitely conditionable. But, in fact, you can condition a human ear to different types of music (it is not the ear, but the mind that you have to condition in such cases); you cannot condition it to hear noise as if it were music; it is not personal training or social conventions that make it impossible, but physiological nature, the identity, of the human ear and brain.

WOMP WOMP.

I find this deeply hilarious.