Personal – Page 7 – An Echo That's Reversing

End of Year, 2021

Today I finished the fourth movement for my suite for turntables and piano (coincidentally, but satisfying).

I’m terrified of 2022 elections and gerrymandering. We’re fucked.

I’m about to take a three month sabbatical from work. I am infinitely lucky I have the ability to do that.

Lisa is in Miami for a fooooot-ball game with Danice.

I’m at the start (~250 of 1,200) of Pynchon’s Against the Day (which I invariably translate to Gegen des Tages though I’m sure that’s nonsense-talk) whereas I started it a decade-or-so-ago and got ~300 pages in but stopped for some reason. I have an ever-expanding document of notes with character names and key events. It helps.

I’ve been back into Duolingo. Maybe it’ll take? I love those characters.

(Lily is a fucking bitch, though.)

I’m proud of what I’ve composed (this year I finished the symphony and string quartet), but have shame that I can no longer play what I had been able to. I use to be able to play an hour of my music, relatively cleanly and from memory; now I don’t play piano at all. I do have plans to ignore the deficiencies of hand dystonia and start playing again next year (this year (timestamp)).

We have made the condo much better this year. New bookshelves; new hallway lighting. Maybe even better next year. That makes me feel like an adult?

I created an @sstradermusic account in order to firewall my composer self from my personal Twitter and have new acquaintances (of a sort), but also gods-among-men individuals who I’m terrified of interacting with.

I bought some really cool artwork.

This is me tonight. I am 2021:

String Quartet No. 2 — First thoughts

I’m still a couple of months away from finishing the Suite for Turntables and Piano, and I never work on two pieces at the same time, but a specific subject and musical structure came to me a few weeks ago so it’s queued up.

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Four months in and finishing the third movement

I’m very metrics-oriented: how long have I worked on a piece? How much music has been written? I read of writers feeling in the-same-or-similar way regarding how many pages they write in a day (it’s always very few). It’s been four months and I’m at 15 minutes of music. I don’t think that means anything.

At this point, I’m not sure that the turntable can hold up as a solo or chamber instrument. That’s a self-canceling suggestion since any instrument can be a member of an ensemble, but I’m trying to balance my fascination for the instrument against the actual experience. So more than self-canceling it’s self-reflective. Half full?

Suite for Turntables and Piano, 2nd mvmt. Barcarolle, measure 88 through 100 (end)

Suite for Turntables and Piano — Considerations on classification and finishing the second movement

Updated 16 Mar 2022

So far writing for turntables feels most similar to writing for tuned percussion. There’s also a sense that it’s somewhere between an acoustic and an electronic instrument. Though what I’m working with (samples) are more on the electronic side, I’m writing for an instrument that produces sound via physical movement and instrument vibration as opposed to spliced tapes or synthesized sounds initiated by, crudely stated but with no pejorative intent, a button push. There is a spectrum of physicality with electronic music, and there is a spectrum of electronic music as it moves further away from a human body initiating the sound. Although this is the first electronic-adjacent music I’ve worked with, it’s been an experience more familiar than expected because of the turntable’s percussive provenance.

*Suite for Turntables and Piano, 2. ich fühle Luft*, measures 143 to 159

The Vortex

Years ago (again, who knows how many) Lisa and I were hanging out at The Vortex on a Sunday afternoon–something we had never done before up to that time (that is: hanging out at The Vortex, not just “hanging out”)–and watching American Ninja Warrior, which we knew existed and knew what it was but had never before watched because it’s kinda like reality TV. That Sunday was our first drinking Sunday: those ones that were meant to avoid Monday. There’s always a first.