Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings

For those of you that don't frequent the BCM forum, I thought I'd post this youtube video of Eric introducing the new space for the upcoming performances of Paradise Lost -- his description also gives you some indication of new directions the show is taking... enjoy!

top 5 spins

1. Tool - 10000 Days
2. Uncle Moe's Space Ranch
3. My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade
4. Coheed and Cambria - Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness
5. John Mayer - Continuum

apartment music

Steve Bryant introduced this to me -- I still think it's one of the coolest things I've ever found online...

Keep on Runnin'

Last weekend, Nicki and I signed up for the 2007 Chicago Marathon.

Inspired by recent events? Maaaaybe...

whew!?

I spoke with Jim Kull, the director from St. Charles East, whose band was kind enough to ask me to write the piece for Nicole Alaniz... they read through Angels with Dirty Faces and it has received a positive response. This has been confirmed by Tara on myspace and also the anonymous percussionist who was cool enough to jump on this blog and respond so quickly that the piece was well-received.

It's always nice to hear that someone likes what you wrote, especially when it comes from other musicians... thanks guys!

Stranglehold

Man, I wish I could talk about working on Stranglehold... I think this game is going to be cooooooool... the stuff we can pull off with the Xbox 360 and Palystation 3 is pretty killer.

The score is a hybrid of orchestra, traditional Asian instruments, with a smattering of electronica. These days, I'm very busy scoring the cut-scenes that'll be in the game -- there will be about 50 of them, and for a video game, these scenes span a very wide range of emotions... which is a great opportunity for a composer. So far, I think I've finished about 7 of them...

N-i-c-o-l-e A-l-a-n-i-z

I figured I'd talk a little bit more about writing Angels with Dirty Faces...

Early on, I tried an experiment just to see what would happen. I assigned a letter to each note of a scale -- so the letter "A" would be the first degree of the scale, "B" would be the second degree, and so on... when I ran out of scale degrees, I just started over... so if we were trying this on the C major scale, it'd look something like this:

... and if you took all the notes that corresponded to Nicole's name, it came out sounding like this:

I tried this with a bunch of different scales and modes, and found that Nicole's name turned out to be a really gorgeous melody... and if you stack the notes on top of one another, they spell out a complete 9 chord. So I ended up using this note/spelling to create most of the content of the piece.

the hardest thing these days...

... is to find time to practice guitar every day. I'm playing Chaos Theory at Eastern Illinois University with maestro Milt Allen in the middle of April, so I've gotta keep those chops in shape!

Angels with Dirty Faces

Someone asked me about the title for this new piece, Angels with Dirty Faces...

This piece was commissioned in memory of Nicole Alaniz -- out of respect I won't go into the circumstances here, but you can read about it if you click here.

Among Nicole's many gifts was her writing, and the phrase "angels with dirty faces" was something I came across in something she wrote. Originally, I'd intended to do a spoken word piece, combining Nicole's prose with music, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to come up with enough cohesive material... so this phrase of vivid imagery is the only splinter that survived from my original fractured sketch of this piece.

(I found out later (via the perceptive memory of King Newman) that it's also the title of a James Cagney movie, which as far as I can tell, bears absolutely NO similarity to my piece whatsoever... but you can't copyright a title, so aside from being guilty of a horrible lack of innovation when it comes to thinking up titles, I've committed no crime...)

back in the saddle again

Hey, I'm back. I'm going to try this again for a while -- just quick updates on the day-to-day, with the occasional back-story...

Last night I put the double bars on my latest concert piece, Angels with Dirty Faces. It's a wind orchestra piece, but I've added a guitar part to it -- this is not a guitar feature, but the guitar plays an important role in the ensemble. The piece is equally as influenced by American minimalists like John Adams and Steve Reich... as it is by African, Indian and Gamelan music... as it is by My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, Moby/BT, Dave Matthews/Indigo Girls, and even a little Jimi Hendrix... Yup, I really let 'em smear together this time...