Online Auction for American Music Center

There are a lot of unique items in this AMC fundraiser auction. Many have NO BIDS! Some are a bit pricey, if you don't collect autographed scores or CDs. You can also bid on commissions and live recitals, even more expensive, but if you have the money, they're a bargain over the actual value. I'm intrigued by Alex Shapiro's career counseling offer. Two days left. Should I bid?

Improv Class Experiences

This fall I've been teaching a class in free improv to two adult students at Lexington Music School, both experienced musicians. We've had a lot of fun as we practiced crafting music in the moment. One student is continuing and we'd love to make the class a larger group. If you're curious, and somewhere northwest of Boston, MA, contact me and come and try it out!

In every lesson, I always am pointing out the necessity for not playing and listening as you're improvising. Listen more than you play! The larger the group, the more important that is. It's a little harder to experience that concept fully with only two players. We needed to get over the tendency to stop and be finished if the other person took a listening break. Allowing your improv partner to take an extended solo, with minimal accompaniment by you is a valuable thing to get comfortable with.

We have done lots of exercises from Jeffrey Agrell's book "Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians". Two exercises that I think were particularly productive were:

One-minute compositions - As a duet, make a plan with your partner, then see how you can make an interesting piece out of it. Making it short keeps you from wandering from idea to idea. Jeffrey has many suggestions for plans, and as soon as I start thinking about any of them, interesting variations and ideas of my own immediately crop up.

Call and response drills - This was intriguing to everyone as a sort-of quiz. A leader plays a measure's worth of melody, everyone else repeats it. There's a set tempo, and the beat keeps the drill moving forward. The leader starts simple and diatonic. The leader chooses material leading to success, not tricking the group into a mistake. After we successfully drilled on the simple rules, we added more of Jeffrey's variations, like adding altered tones, changing key by half step or whole step, finally atonal. This was the hardest, not a surprise! Even adding altered tones and changing keys tripped us up. Also, the faster the tempo, the more you need concentration and focus. Everyone got to be the leader. That's just as important as being able to follow.

Does anybody out there have some favorite practice drills of their own for improv and ear training?

Get a Recording Education Online

I'm impressed by how often Wikipedia has an article on any topic I want to know about. I was looking for information on microphone techniques and the topic Microphone Practice even had diagrams. I also discovered WikiRecording, which had really helpful articles. Check out their category page Microphone Techniques. They have manuals for a lot of equipment, too.

I was trying to make a budget for a future Guild project - recording sessions for Body and Soul songs, with singer and chamber ensemble. I was trying to decide if I should go to someone else's studio or if my live concert recording methods would give me a compelling CD-quality result. I don't have the equipment for individual micing of more that 2 players. I only have four channels and I would use 2 channels for a stereo overview of the ensemble, then an individual mic for the singer, at least. Would I need to mic the three instrumentalists too? Another drawback is that I don't have a monitoring and playback setup so the musicians can listen either, just headphones for me.

So I think I should find the right studio, and learn from what happens in the session.

Rebirth of Spindrift Commissioning Guild

I don’t seem to be able to write blog entries regularly. Either I’m hard at work at something else, or I’ve finished that something, which I could write about, but I’ve moved on. I’m going to try harder to capture some of what’s going on in my composing life more often. I've got improv classes to write about, and some exciting projects with my Spindrift Commissioning Guild.

The Guild has gotten a boost, because it is now a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, making Guild donations tax-deductible. I’ve been hard at work on my web site, Spindrift Music Company, to describe the Guild and to help people discover the projects. Good web site design with clear navigation paths is hard! Take a look and let me know what you think.

Improv with Audio Files and Computers

I heard an interesting concert last Friday. The New England Phonographers Union appeared in the Art Without Borders concert series at the Democracy Center in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. They each make their own audio recordings of “found sound”, whatever is going on in the world around them. Then, without further editing, maybe just a little EQ, they improvise a group composition with these audio files.

Each performer came with their own laptop and amplification system, so there were 8 speakers around the edges of the small hall. The small audience for this under-publicized, off-the-radar event sat mesmerized watching and listening. I could see the intense concentration on each performer’s face as they selected sounds and shaped them via volume and panning to fit with the other’s sounds. The first piece was a slowly evolving soundscape of road noise and industrial sounds, interrupted briefly by a very close-up door latch. It was hypnotic and calming, very meditative - not a usual characteristic of industrial. As I listened, I felt contradictory impulses: to identify the sound and to appreciate the sound out-of-context as a purely musical entity. The second piece was more animated, with more of activity generally and manipulations and repetititions of particular sounds.

At the break, there were lots of questions about their performing process. They each have different levels of comfort with editing their files. One thought a little EQ was OK to enhance the target sound, another said no editing at all. They each used different software to organize and launch their sounds. Before each piece, they make a quick plan. As they worked, it was clear that each performer had “solo” segments in turn.

It would be fun to perform with them (I’d need the right hardware - laptop and portable speakers). My palette of available sound files, mostly from nature, would contribute to a very different soundscape. Last Friday, their palette of sounds was mainly urban-industrial. They joked that their last concert had too much bird song.

Improv classes and composition lessons

I've talked to various teachers who tell me that there's a lot of attrition in their private teaching studios. Parents have lost jobs or are moving or are just cutting back. So it's a bad time to launch myself into teaching. But that's what I'm doing!

I'll be offering an improv class - Free Improv for Classical Musicians. Free means open structure, rather than more structured jazz improv. Check out these class descriptions at Spindrift.com. My textbook is "Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians" by Jeffrey Agrell. These classes are for intermediate to advanced students of any instrument or voice, as well as adult musicians who are beyond the beginner level.

Come to an introductory session - free of cost - on September 24, Thursday, 5:30pm. Lexington School of Music, Munroe Center for the Arts, 1403 Mass Ave., Lexington, MA.

Contact me to register for the open improv session or the class, or to sign up for composition lessons - contact info.

Review of FTM 10 concert

Sabrina Pena Young has written a review of Feminist Theory and Music 10 Concert 1 in North Carolina in May. The concert included my Body and Soul Vol. 2, sung by soprano Jodi Hitzhusen, with an art exhibition by Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer, my collaborator in the project along with poet Elizabeth Kirschner.

Read it here...
Feminist Theory and Music Conference UNC Greensboro: Concert 1 Music Review
New music concert review of Concert I at the Feminist Theory and Music Conference 2009 held at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, May 27, 2009.
http://www.associatedcontent.comarticle/1919176/feminist_theory_and_music_conference.html