Drab Makyo

Little song I whipped up in Reason for the occasion here.

I’ve been listening to podcasts, watching videos, and reading articles over the past two or three years that relate to the financial melt-down as well as politics and gender issues.  These things really do interest me quite a bit, as I’ve always wondered how something as abstract as government really works, ever since Dr. Carter’s history class in high school. I mean, it always looked so good on paper that it boggled the mind to think that that was how things really worked in the world.  Of course, now I’m much older – I’ve been out of high school (and away from Dr. Carter) for seven years or so and I’ve come to realize that the idealized form of direct democracy they teach in elementary and middle school, and the idealized form of representative democracy they teach in high school barely begin to scratch the surface.

Lets go ahead and combine this with the fact that it seems as though Planet Money, one of the financial podcasts that I follow, was created solely to explain the financial crisis to people in clear terms, seemingly a spin-off of This American Life after that show aired a few episodes regarding not only the financial issues, but issues of health care and housing.  We can also add in the additional reading and discussing that has been going on between a few friends and I about the problems involved in religion, and a few other friends and I about the problems involved in gender.

Finally, combine these with a few books I’ve been reading about disparate subjects but which all involve this concept of non-spatial, non-temporal ideas and we get the hole I’ve dug myself in now.

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The audio recordings of my senior recital have been posted – video will be coming soon.  I’m feeling okay about the recordings – not great, and not bad.  Overall, they are too slow, not up to the tempi I would like.  Also, there are a few problems with the performances of each piece, but not so much as to ruin them.  They are all posted here, after the cut, but they may be found at http://drab-makyo.com/collection/senior-recital/.

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In my post-recital… ennui?  Freedom?  Afterglow?  Well, anyhow, after my recital, I’ve found that it’s rather difficult to get back into writing music after spending so long away from it simply trying to get the recital up and running with as few hitches as possible (as has already been previously beaten to death here), and even though its been two weeks, I’ve only written about five bars of music.

Part of the problem has been that I was fairly demoralized after the recital.  After seeing how difficult it was to pull together the performers and get them learning the music as best as possible in even so long a time, I felt that perhaps I was doing something wrong with my music, writing it in such a way as to make it difficult for the performers to learn, read from, or perform.  It was hard for me to go back to writing music that I felt would cause more of the same reactions that I got to my music on my senior recital.

Beyond that, though, I felt that I had lost the sense of process that I had used to write music in the past, a process that served me through several years.  Several of my pieces are based off one process or another.  For example, each of the Character Dances was based off one aspect of a relationship between me and another.  TW was based off the idea of constancy against flightiness.  The left hand of the piano only plays two notes for the entire piece, while the right hand skitters around it indicating a change too quick to handle.

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On Friday, March 26th at 4:30PM in the Organ Recital Hall at the UCA, I had my senior recital.  The recital is a for-credit class that is technically geared towards performance majors, but they’re required of composition, education, and bachelor of the arts majors as well.  Usually, grading is pretty straight-forward.  Your applied teacher sits in the audience and watches you along with everything else, grading your performance of music that you have learned under their tutelage over the last however many semesters.  Grades are as you would expect them – technicality, stage presence, song interpretation, working with the accompanist, and so on.

Composition is a little different, however.  With composition, your work on the pieces has already been graded by the applied professor, for the most part, you aren’t even performing the pieces.  The point of the recital shifts away from proving you can sing or play to proving you can pull together music and get it performed somehow.  Your job changes from learning music and reciting it on stage to writing music, finding performers, organizing rehearsals, then organizing the recital and possibly conducting or performing the pieces, though the focus on that latter part is minimal.

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