Saturday, February 24, 2018

Turning it up to eleven...

Today my blog turns 11. I decided yesterday that a good way to celebrate would be to rebuild, from the ground up, one of my favorite and most distinctive blog features: MM's Magical Multimedia Musing Machine. I was surprised to look back and discover that I debuted this random media generator way back in May of 2007 when I'd only been blogging a little over three months. Though I'd begun the blog thinking it would mostly be a writing journal, the use of audio, video, and graphic creations had already became central to my mission as I realized the possibilities of an online platform. This has led to the development of all sorts of multimedia authoring skills, an increased interest in composition and arranging, and a wide variety of adventures in coding and web design.

The original Musing Machine was designed in a pretty clunky manner, as I barely knew anything about JavaScript. Basically, each new possible destination was created as its own blog page; each "spin" of the wheel picked a different random page. This meant there was no way to do any sort of global editing of these pages, and it also meant that as various ways of embedding multimedia became obsolete, I'd have to track down every single offending page. Ugh.

However, the biggest problem was that the mechanism to operate the machine was located in the blog margin, and I realized recently that Blogger doesn't even show those margins to most mobile users - which is how most people consume web content now. Creating a new setup doesn't completely solve that problem, but it should mean that once one lands on a random page, the option to spin again is right there. You can still use the old version on mobile by choosing to view the "web version" of my archives site, but each time it's activated, your device will likely bring you back to a mobile view where the machine is not visible.

Anyway, that's all pretty boring and I only have about an hour left on this blogiversary, so just a couple more comments.

This new version is truly brand new and still very much a work-in-progress. It has more than 300 destinations loaded in (probably including a few dead ends I missed), but there are more to add and the look is quite barebones for now.

But the important thing is that this is a really fun way to dive into eleven years worth of material. If you've followed me much at all, you'd know that the idea of a random method of discovery appeals very much to my love for finding surprising connections. There are definitely lots of quirky landing spots as well as some that I believe are genuinely inspired, but I see the quirky stuff as just as essential to my work as the more polished stuff. Wherever you land, you'll have the option of clicking over to the original blog post where more context is provided about what I had in mind.

So, take it for a spin. If you don't like where you land, you can just hit the little red button in the upper right and try again. Happy hunting!


http://thedoctorinspiteofhimself.com/machine.html


Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Oh no no no . . . I'm a hocket man

I've been blogging for almost eleven years, but I've never posted on Valentine's Day. However, I stumbled on something absurd yesterday which just begged to be showcased today.

Our story begins last Friday when I tweeted out a story that I'd heard from a Facebook music teacher friend:
Friend asked his HS students to ID a musical technique where melodic notes are passed back & forth between two parts. 
He hinted: “starts with an h- and ends with -ocket.” 
The answer offered: Hot Pocket!
Great story! Then, a couple of days later, another friend, knowing my many weaknesses, tweeted back the following:
Waiting for your arrangement of the "Hot Pockets" jingle utilizing the hocket device.
I tried to ignore it, but I've also come to terms with who I am....so on Monday, I put this bit of nonsense together:



Look, it's pretty bad (it's not like the jingle tune I was working with is Gershwin) and I've even left it as "Unlisted" on my Youtube account. But, I was intrigued by this idea of writing a melody which is formed by two alternating parts, particularly in which the individual parts make sense both as music AND as text. I couldn't tell you what a Waterpik® has to do with hockets or who's "goin' up to Pa (?)," but I figured if I started from scratch, I could come up with some sort of interlocking lyric puzzle pieces. It would be even better if merging the two pieces created an opposite sort of meaning.

A lover's quarrel that fuses into a love duet seemed like a fun way to go, and when I realized it was Valentine's Day Eve, the race was on. It took most of my lunch break to sketch out the lyrics, and after fiddling a lot with double negatives, verb agreements, and the like, I had a rickety libretto. I'm sure there are better solutions (the two individual parts seem to be missing some important context), but I was happy to find something that worked at all.

This led to the really interesting musical challenge of building two melodies (for female and male registers) which cohere into a satisfying single melody across the two registers. Mind you, none of this existed at all even 24 hours ago, so this is still very much in the "concept" stage, but I do have a "performance" to share featuring my beloved virtual singers. Somehow, their yearning-to-be-human robot voices seem well-suited to the strangeness of this mini-duet.

Although it's more of an exercise than a completed composition (the piano part is especially half-baked), I figure I'll present it as a Valentine's Day Special:



...and if you'd rather hear synth-y oboe and bassoon, I've got that too:



The structure is quite simple. The parts take turns, each singing twice, against minor-key harmonies. Then, they overlap twice, creating a new melody and text, and finally the soprano sings the same melody with the tenor adding harmony beneath. As dramatic progressions go, it's rather sudden, but I think it's a nice melody.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Friday, February 2, 2018

Fuguing up to Boston

After I'd posted the little fugue I wrote based on a theme from Scheherazade, a friend alerted me to the disturbing fact that an organist from Philadelphia has just written a fugue on "Fly, Eagles, Fly." That's the fight song for a football team that will be playing my team in a little game on Sunday. I actually first read the alert as a fugue on "Fly like an eagle," which I think would make a better fugue subject...if, that is, I wanted the Eagles to fly.

Anyway, here is my response:



It's based on the Dropkick Murphys' "Shipping up to Boston," which has become the go-to pulse-pounding anthem for the local teams. The song begins with a rousing Irish jig which makes a nice fugue subject in the gigue style. The rest took shape pretty quickly, in part I'm sure because I've been in a fugue state of mind for the last week or so. (See previous posts here and here.) It's a short fugue, but it incorporates lots of fun techniques including inversion, retrograde, and augmentation. And unlike your typical Bach fugue, it's got football highlights.* Go Pats!



Incidentally, the word fuguing is most closely associated, in my mind at least, with the fuguing tunes (or fuging tunes) of Boston composer William Billings - songs like this in which the choral parts occasionally go off into fugue-like passages [like at 0:58]. However, if I wanted rugged Boston sounds, I'd prefer the Murphys. (A friend reminded me of this memorable rendition of the national anthem at a game I attended.)



* The background videos were pretty hastily assembled last night, but just like a fugue usually has lots of little insider tricks, I like that the grainy background video features a series of great moments in Patriots history that any insider will immediately recognize.