New
Year's resolutions come and go. They
usually come after Christmas and disappear by mid-January. To this rule, I have historically been no
exception. However, I'm proud to
announce that 2012 is the first year in which I have made it through. I'm writing this review to chronicle the
process and the experience, but even more important than the accomplishments
from this resolution, was spending a year of being true to myself, which was
the primary impetus for the accomplishments that resulted.
In
December of 2011, I was a student in the PhD program in music theory at
Louisiana State University, with a minor in music composition. I had always had a passion for composing
music, but I was majoring in music theory, because I believed that as a
teacher, I would actually prefer to teach theory instead of composition. Sadly, this decision led to a major decline
in my compositional output. In reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
one key point really stood out. It was
that we are "defined by our actions."
I realized that although I considered myself to be a composer, I no
longer felt like a composer, because I simply didn't compose very much.
I had
gotten frustrated with myself and the reception of my material in the world of
academia, which didn't generally appreciate popular music and musical theatre,
which were the main thing I enjoyed composing.
In December 2011, I had the idea that it would be really great to make a
big push for writing songs again, not for school, but just so my actions would
once again define me as a composer. I
had considered writing and recording a song each day, but my wife wisely
suggested that a song each week would be a more reasonable goal, considering my
current time commitments as a student, teacher, father, etc.
So I
set out in January 2012 announcing that I would be writing and recording a song
each week for the entire year. I think
many people didn't expect it to last, in fact, three or four months into the project,
some of my colleagues told me how surprised they were that I was keeping up
with it. Personally, I was surprised at
how much more efficient I got at the process of writing and recording with
regular practice.
In
fact, I didn't have a lot of home recording experience. I have some musical equipment and a decent
computer, but I wasn't very familiar with recording software. I had used a freeware program to put together
some very basic recordings a few years back, but they were far from
professional quality. When beginning
this project, I had remembered that a colleague had once recommended the
freeware program Audacity as an excellent home recording software, so I
downloaded it and starting tinkering.
In my
first song, "The More You Think You Know," I recorded a piano track
and then added the vocal parts on top, and finally added a tambourine and
shaker (as these were the instruments at my disposal). For
the second song, "Big Bad Jim," I actually had the foresight to use a
click track, which made the process of aligning the instruments easier. I also experimented with using EQ on the
vocals to make them sound more brassy.
Additionally, I learned how to use the horizontal pan space to make
these two songs sound fuller.
For the
third song, "I Look to the Stars," I recorded my first
"synth" song, in the sense that I used my Roland XV-5080 sound module
to create something that sounded like "synth" music, as opposed to
using it to emulate actual acoustic instruments. This also came in handy for the sixth song,
"We Have a Visitor," which used synthesized music and audio clips
from the ALF TV show. This was also the first song of the year
which I wrote with a humorous intent, but was certainly not the last.
I was
amazed at how soon after the beginning of the project that my musical
colleagues became interested in collaborating.
After the first couple of songs, I asked my friend Gracie Steavns, who
is a vocalist and string player in Denver, if she would be interested in
collaborating. She was very enthusiastic
about the idea, so I wrote song five, "Damascus," for her to
record. I scored it for two violins,
viola, and mezzo soprano, and Gracie performed all four parts on the recording. I was absolutely pleased at how the recording
came out.
Song
ten, "Lonely Tonight," was my next collaboration. My friends Stephen and Adam Embree recorded
this one. They perform in an electropop
duo called The Solution, and I was very interested in seeing what they would do
with one of my songs. I wrote a song
specifically with them in mind, and I recorded a demo with just piano, playing
chords in quarter notes, and a single vocal line. I made the actual surface musical choices as
generic as possible in my demo recording to give the Embrees plenty of room to
interpret it their own way. The result
was astounding, and very different than I ever could have imagined.
As the
project went along, I also learned more about creating videos to go along with
them. I posted all the songs to YouTube,
mostly as a convenient way to host the audio and to share via social networking
sites such as Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, and Pinterest. The "videos" for the first four
songs included only a title card that remained on the screen for the duration
of the song. The next few songs featured
slideshows of images, which were more or less timed to certain words or musical
features of the song. For song 11,
"The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," I experimented with video for the
first time, by simply recording a stationary video of a lake in Baton Rouge.
Songs
19 and 20, "Breathe in the noiSe (Breathe out the Silence)" and
" You Talk Entirely Far Too Much," featured full video
throughout. The former contained video
of me walking around doing things around Baton Rouge Lake, and the latter was
video of me singing the song, although the audio heard on the video is the
version that I recorded previously on the computer. Song 28, "Celestial Dance,"
represented a fascinating collaboration in which I recorded an instrumental
track for a samba tune, which I shared via Dropbox, with the vocalist Kelly
Riely in Independence, Missouri. In her
home studio, she added the vocal part to the track and her husband Michael
helped shoot a video of her singing it.
She shared these with me via Dropbox, and in Baton Rouge, I recorded a
short clip of me playing the keyboard solo in the middle of the piece. The final video shows Kelly singing in
Independence, MO at the beginning, and at the next cut, I am seen playing keyboard
in Baton Rouge, LA. It is amazing that
internet technology makes this sort of collaboration possible.
Only
one of the videos in the project was a live performance, "Psalm 16"
from week 23. This was a live
performance of a choral work that I composed, which was performed by the
Trinity Lutheran Choir in Baton Rouge.
This came about as a colleague of mine in the PhD program heard
"Damascus" and became enthusiastic about me writing a song for his
church choir. Although the video is
live, there was a small amount of creative editing that helped get the best
possible outcome from the footage. I
recorded two performances of the song (one from each service) from different
angles. One of the angles put the camera
rather close to the air conditioning vent adding a lot of background
noise. The other angle had less noise,
but unfortunately there was a rather noticeable missed note during the end of
that performance. For the best result, I
carefully spliced the audio from the end of one performance on to the end of
the other, being careful to make sure that the audio remained in sync with the
video, but also making sure that the audio splice was not noticeable to the
ear. It was not possible to get an
entirely clean recording with congregational noise in addition to the
previously mentioned air conditioning vent, but with a little work, I was able
to get the best product from the recording footage that I took.
One of
the most interesting aspects of the project was the opportunity I had for
experimentation. In particular, songs 9
and 45, "Bathsheba's Song" and "I Have a Bad Feeling About
This" were electronic pieces that were included on the programs for the
Experimental Music/Digital Media concerts at LSU in the spring and autumn. "Bathsheba's Song," in particular,
was full of experimental ideas. I used
effects such as phasing, panning, reverb, reversing the audio, among others to
create a very eerie sound.
An
interesting and not entirely expected outcome of the project was the number of
humorous songs that came out of it. I
figured that I would write some humorous material, but to my surprise, more
than one fourth of the songs were overtly humorous in their intent. As I wrote humorous material, I sent it to
Dr. Demento, a radio DJ that specializes in novelty songs. This endeavor proved rather successful, as
songs of mine were featured on eight episodes of The Dr. Demento Show in 2012.
After a while, I realized that it would beneficial to send my material
to other DJs as well, so I also received airplay on Ben's Wacky Radio, A-log on
the Airwaves, and I Still Get
Demented. Additionally, I was proud
to learn that my "ALF for President" song (week 22) was shared by
Linda Fusco on her Facebook wall. Linda
is one of the ALF puppeteers and wife of Paul Fusco, creator of ALF.
It was
also interesting to keep an eye on the viewing statistics, which YouTube tracks
automatically. In week 39, I wrote a
parody of the Sesame Street theme, entitled, "That is How You Get to
Sesame Street." After Romney made a
controversial comment about eliminating funding for PBS at the first
presidential debate, mentioning Big Bird specifically, I noticed a significant
spike in the number of views on that particular video the next day. After seeing the rapidity with which internet
memes popped up immediately following the debate, I decided that I would try to
quickly pick up the most memorable quotes to pop up in the next two debates and
post something as quickly as possible.
After the second debate, I posted song 43, "Binders Full of
Women" around noon the next day. It
got a considerable amount of attention, but to my surprise, I found that there
were already about a dozen other "Binders Full of Women" songs posted
before mine. For the third debate, I
began writing "Horses and Bayonets" while the debate was still taking
place. After the quote was spoken by
Obama, I saw a big response to it on Facebook and decided that it would probably
be the most memorable of the debate. I
completed the recording of the song that very night and it ends the year with
the highest number of views with 5,798.
Of course, while these two videos had enormous viewership in the first
week after posting, they dropped significantly after the hype cooled down.
I had
been considering getting involved in advocating for children's mental health
for some time now, and after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, I felt moved
to begin work on a free internet source for stories and songs that can help
children to learn coping skills. The
final three songs, "Time to Calm Down," "When Things Don't Go
Your Way," and "Time to Clean Up," are all songs that were
written for this effort.
Many of
the songs in the Year of Song project allowed me to express a wide variety of
emotions, but the one that will probably leave the most lasting memory is
"Te Quiero, Princesa," which I wrote for my eight-year old niece who
was dying of cancer. It was difficult to
write, but it also turned about being the most meaningful. The song was played at my niece's funeral in
July.
An
interesting, and completely, unexpected outcome of this project occurred about
halfway through the year, when a music theory professor of mine actually asked if
I should perhaps be a composition major instead of a theory major. I had actually been thinking how I would like
to do this, but felt that it was logistically impossible without adding at
least another year to my program.
However he suggested that I at least consider it, so I began looking at
the requirements and asking questions.
Long story short – my professors were very supportive and I succeeded in
switching my major and minor and still plan to graduate on my original time
frame. It's amazing that when I began
writing regularly (in other words, doing what a composer does), that I very
naturally became a composer, and my professors also saw this and were able to
easily accept that I am a composer. In
this way, I truly defined myself through my actions.
The
year is at an end, but I see no reason to end the project. My resolution for 2013 is to continue
producing a song each week. In addition,
I plan to add new material to my website for children's coping skills on a
weekly basis. The current plan for the
website is to have a collection of at least 90 stories with discussion
questions and twenty songs that can be used to help children cope with real
life situations. I'm hoping that at this
time next year, I can write another review about the effect of this outreach
effort.
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