Monday, August 18, 2008

Suburban Scene Part 1

I'm finally getting to work writing out pieces of music that i intended to finish 3 years ago. The work, which was framed with parts written while i was still in highschool, has waited for 3 years for me to feel musically mature enough to make something coherent out of it.

While i dont necessarily think i'm "musically mature" Its more or less high time that i get to work on it, regardless as to how i feel about my own compositional voice. Everything is a learning process, so why not just dive in? I'm not going to get anywhere with it if i dont try. So thats what i've undertaken, the first piece is almost finished and... its intended to be a set of maybe 8 piano pieces. So one of 8 so far... a ways to go, but i have a lot of time and i'm in no rush. They've waited for 3 years or more... they can sit on the burner a while.

Anyway, the interesting part about all this is that i knew what i wanted to call this set of pieces long before i knew exactly what would be in it. And the name of it actually gave the name of this blog. The set is entitled "Music for a Suburban Scene" and its sort of my attempt at a summation and melding of the musical influences that inevitably resulted from my years in suburban america. Kinda a lofty goal, i'd say. But hey, aim high right? Really, its a set of pieces meant to evoke life in a cul-de-sac, life around SUVs , Burger King, Safeways, traffic and parking lots.life around families with teenagers, dogs, Sprinklers and unkept lawns. I'm not actually sure as to the titles of all the set but i sure as hell know that one of them is going to called "The Mandingo", you can google to figure out what that means.

other ideas for titles were "beige carpets" and "tricycles".

I guess those are still on the drawing board. Anyway, this first piece has turned out to be much more technically demanding than i expected, and it was *supposed* to be the simple introduction. Ah well, makes things more fun to play.


This is the only opera i can honestly say i enjoy, and thankfully some kind dude posted the entire thing on youtube.

I fucking love mussorgsky and I wish he had written more in his short life.