Daniel Powers

Archive for November, 2007

It’s been a while since I’ve entered anything. There’s a lot to get caught up on, so I’ll start by updating the status of my various projects.

1. Concerto Piccolo

Status: Done, mostly. The composition part is definitely complete. I need to make one more pass through the score to catch any little improvements that can be made, then it’s ready to send to the printer. There’s more to do, of course. I need to extract and format the piccolo part and send that to Kate, then extract all the orchestral parts. Fortunately, thanks to modern technology, those tasks will be done quickly!

2. Piece for euphonium, bass trombone, and piano

Status: Begun. I haven’t gotten too far with it yet. I have the beginnings of a beginning, and a few vague ideas for the whole. I’d like to have a clearer idea of the whole work before I start on it in earnest.

3. Alone in Space (film score)

I haven’t mentioned this one before because I only started on it about 10 days ago. I came across a competition at the CGEmpire forum for a score to a short animated film, and I just thought it would be fun to enter. I finished it up last night and submitted it, and there is now a link to it on the site. Since the competition is supposed to be anonymous, I shall for now refrain from identifying which submission is mine. But I don’t think it will be too hard for anyone who’s at all familiar with my music. I’ll post a link to it when the competition is over. Wish me luck!

And that’s basically it for now. I want to be getting back to The Concerto Project as soon as possible, and I’m wanting to do some major revisions to my website as soon as possible. Hopefully

I finally finished a draft score of Concerto Piccolo last night. It’s way overdue at this point, so I’m going to finish the final score at top speed. Not much needs to be done, mostly just tidying up the notation and touching up the orchestration, but the piece is almost all there at this point.

I mentioned earlier my problems with the ending. I finally solved them by scrapping the original ending entirely and writing a new one. Which of course meant I had to rewrite a considerable portion of the music leading up to it.

The problem with the original ending was that I just couldn’t figure out a way to integrate it with the rest of the movement. There was nothing wrong with it by itself, but it didn’t fit in with what came before. Most of the movement is fairly laid back in tempo and attitude, and the original ending was faster, more brilliant, and ended with a bang.

The new ending is completely different than before, continuing the moderate tempo of the rest of the movement, and ending quietly, with a casual little flourish from the solo piccolo. It probably isn’t what people are expecting, but it works much better and I like it.

I almost forgot. I finally got around to updating my website yesterday, and uploaded my arrangement of Carol Of The Birds. I had planned to post the original, longer version, but after listening to it I decided that the short version was actually better. So that’s the one I posted.

I’ve just learned about an interesting weekly podcast by Jay Batzner, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida. Called “Unsafe Bull” (I don’t know why), every week he creates a short electro-acoustic work, creates a podcast about it, and slaps it up on the internet. He’s been doing this since February.

I’ve only listened to a few so far; it’ll take me a while to get caught up. But I’m enjoying not only the pieces, but the composer’s humorous comments on each one. They all tend to lean toward abstract sound manipulation. Many of his pieces use sounds from the Freesound Project (which I don’t know a thing about) mixed and mangled to the point of unrecognisibility (which probably isn’t a word).

Unsafe Bull is nominated for a Weblog award in the “Best Podcast” category. If you’re interested in strangely beautiful sound–and who isn’t–take a moment to check it out.