Well, it's 6:18 am here and I'm up! I may be able to go back to sleep soon, but I'm not really sure. I thought of something with the impromptu; that is giving it three movements with subtitles for each of them. Kind of modern for me, but it might be fun.

This will be a short post as I have a clear mind at this time of morning. I must say, blogging here has a good feel in the spirit. I'm not getting my usual attacks. It feels sort of friendly. If I get an attack, I'm going to put the writing somewhere else... I find it hard not to go ballistic every once in a while. I had another embarrassing moment at livejournal because of it.

I love how clear I am in the mornings. Right now I'm trying to figure out something about my piece; I realize that sounds crazy, but it's kind of like writing a character in a theatre piece - you create something and it has a life of its own, a kind of egregore almost, and then you try to figure out how that egregore is evolving.

Well, that's it for this time of the morning. More later as the day goes on.

Well, I'm going to write more here because I like talking in public better than typing offline. First thing is that I'm playing with my Grandparent's new PC, that got delivered to my Dad's house today. I've got it all set up for them, and the keyboard is a nice change after the keyboard of sludge back home. I'm going to buy a new keyboard next week and be done with it. They don't cost that much, and I don't need anything fancy. I'll probably buy a Mac keyboard so I can use the keystrokes I'm used to. CompUSA has a nice Mac section.

Well, I'm very disheartened about being an artist right now. I've written a very good cello solo and it's a sonata, and I can't even hear it played by a real performer for quite a few years. I wish I had a setup like Haydn had: rich uncle Easterhazy just gives you a great orchestra to monkey around with as long as you do two concerts a week. That's one reason Haydn is so great. All of that stuff was field-tested a bunch of times and altered a little bit to make it better.

The short story is pretty good, but it's climaxing in an odd way, and I think it needs revision. I hate writing the way you have to; short sentences, lots of verbs, not too many adjectives. Sucks ass. There's not a long sentence in that story though. I don't write there like I blog here.

It's a science fiction story, and it's hard sf. The science in it isn't real, but it's as realistic as I could make it without making it really boring. Some of the stuff might work in real life too. There is some stuff that would work as anime, and some stuff that's kind of like Chess or something, lots of considering possibilities and making strategic and political decisions. It came out very easy, but I want a book, not a short story. If it's a book, what will I have to add? The plot will get ungainly and I don't make crap I make art. We'll see. I'm no Hemingway or Steinbeck, but I love SFand I'd like to get something of short novel length. I do know one place to expand and that's in the background with the political structure and that kind of thing. Culture, politics, that kind of thing.

I've got the first 38 bars of an Impromptu done, and it's pretty good too. I'm not sure where to go next... the development of an impromptu is improvisational, and I've kind of worn out the thematic material I started with pretty well. What I need is something contrasting. I was thinking roughly 128 bars give or take a little. It doesn't have to be a multiple of 8 because it's an impromptu, so I can quit in the realm of 110 or so. That's roughly 440 beats, divided by roughly 72 beats per minute at the Adagio tempo, so a little more than 6 minutes.

It's much easier to write a sonata in a lot of ways, except for the third or the possible fourth movement. The third movement is a rondo and requires a lot of thematic material, and the fourth is a scherzo. Rondo's are a pain in the neck. Scherzo's are a pain in the ass. I got a C on a final work for my treatment of a Scherzo, and the only people that did better in the class were the two resident geniuses who got A's on everything, and who in my opinion, wrote garbage, but sour grapes is not something I'm free of, so there we are.

I haven't written a Scherzo in this second period of my writing after school, but I have a theme for a String Quartet, and String Quartet's have to be 4 movements, so in my skrying dish I'm seeing a Scherzo in the future. A Scherzo is fast, it's in 3/4 and it's considered a real achievement to write a good one. It's based on the Minuet and it's also based on a fast 3/4 folk dance that may or may not still be danced in Italy, I think that's where it's from, and anyway I plan on writing a good first one in my second period.

Oh and just so you know, the subtitle of the Cello Solo is "Chasms of the Deep" and the Subtitle of Impromptu No.1 is "Puzzle Box".

Well I write a little, and I write music and do art, and I can tell you that in all three disciplines the most frustrating, horrifying, and spirit breaking thing about them is publishing. First off, unless you do mass market stuff, you're not going to get paid for publishing work. It's a sad fact. Very often that mass market stuff requires a connection or a contact to get into, and those kind of contacts require spending money.

If you make good art, then what you have to do is vanity publishing. This means, that you pay to publish your own work. The more widely distributed you want the work to be, and the better the publisher, the more you pay. This is why you see a lot of independently wealthy people in the halls of authorship fame. This set up has been going on for quite a while. To distribute a book widely costs several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment, and this is a whole lot of money for vanity's sake.

You may note I said - all THREE disciplines. In classical music there are two ways to have your pieces played. One is to have someone commission a work. This generally involves contacts, degrees, and all kinds of schmoozing that real artists don't have the personalities for. The other is to publish your scores. Unless you've been commissioned to write a work, your scores will be published by a vanity publisher, and the more money you spend the more likely someone is going to see it and play it in the concert hall.

This is why I'm studying mathematics now. I'm going to get a job that doesn't involve a deli slicer or a cash register, and invest, and when I have enough money, I'll publish. I make ART, NOT CRAP. I'm not going to write the three-thousandth emo song with the confessional lyrics. It's all the same, it's very easy to do, and I would never get published because I don't have an inside line.

I plan on making some electronic dance music, because I love Hardstep and EBM, and I'm thinking of trying to put up an Andromeda site just to sell tracks for 99 cents a pop or something. I might do a dollar even, because I hate how iTunes racks up pennies that you can't spend. The problem with setting up an Andromeda site is that it's like 1100 dollars down. 200 for the commercial license of Andromeda, 100 for the webspace and hosting, 200 for a thawte certificate so you don't get in trouble for taking credit card accounts. 200 for a small business package and 200 to incorporate so you don't spend all of your time in court proving you didn't steal the song. It adds up to a lot of headaches for something that will make you 100 bucks a month. I'm going to do it though, eventually.

As far as art, I'm a real amateur. There are always walls that want local art in my town, but real gallery space is nonexistent here. There is one real gallery, no art house galleries, and no where to go if you want to be taken seriously. Buying wall space is common in big towns, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of that goes on around here. It's also nice to have a friend that just opened a coffee shop or an art house restaurant, but this isn't a big gig if you know what I mean. So you move to an artsy town like Chicago or New York, and you fight against the rising tide of artists so large you wouldn't believe, and in the meantime you need a day job. So you wait tables and shit.

Look, the nice thing is this: You work in the quarry while you're buying space in people's minds, and you get a reputation. If you don't destroy all your brain cells or attempt suicide a bunch of times, you eventually get people asking you to write or paint things, and then the money starts coming in. The problem is, most people don't have a 15 year attention span to get to that level. I'm that obsessive. The degree, the job analyzing marketing data or whatever works, some time in Manhattan, beer on Friday or Saturday night when I think I'm going to break, and by the time I'm 40 I'll be a well-known modern composer who writes a certain style that people want for certain occassions.

I'm more ambitious than that, but we'll just have to see. It's a good thing I'm stubborn.

Hardstep - a very finely distinguished form of drum and bass that is very hard driving, see Dieselboy

EBM - a form of electronica that people usually call industrial, that involves danceable beats and lots of gothic sounds, See KMFDM

Sonata - A three part musical piece of the most serious and highly complex of classical works. Must be tonal, must move through certain key changes and sections, and must have a theme worthy of such treatment.

Art Music - "Classical Music" but extended to "classical music" written in any time period.

Theme - a motif that will be developed in a certain way by putting it through a musical process

Motif - an undeveloped theme, a snatch of melody

Parlor Room Satanist - Someone who mixes in the parlor room while secretly doing shocking or occult things

libretto - the text of an opera. If it's High Opera it must be Italian. It must be poetry. It must have a plot. It must have characters and text suitable to be turned into vocals.

Opera - a musical form of theatre with certain complex conventions in it, like recitative and arias. The highest form of vocal music in art music.

Recitative - unacommpanied singing that mimics talking that advances the development and plot of a High Opera

Aria - a piece sung by the soprano that showcases her voice in an Opera

Development - musical permutations of a theme

Well, I picked up my Dad and took him to get a car for work this week, and then I took a nap. This unemployed thing would be fine if it came with a paycheck. I won't be busy again until January, so I may pick up something in retail or something. Gah. But it will buy art supplies and that kind of thing, so I guess I should do that. Mom and Dad don't care, I've been sick, but I'm just really bored.

My projects are coming along okay. The book is about short story length, and the plot is pretty much done... I'm thinking it might need some kind of romance or something... but of course that will take away from the integrity of the piece... I could try selling it as a short story, but that's kind of pointless. The problem is that even if I don't have to pay to have it published, a short story is only worth around $75. I could enter it in a contest or something and try to go for the big money... I don't think it's good enough. Not enough of a turn at the end.

The Cello Solo Sonata I talked about is completed, kind of a rough go at the end there but I think I did well. I can't wait to write four movement pieces! I'm waiting to start the next piece.

I did a clean out of art projects, and now I'm looking to start some new ones. I'm a big believer in saving only things that are worthwhile. My paintings aren't serious work, they're just things I do in the creative process. I'm really a classical composer, and I'm mediocre at everything else.

I thought of an idea for an Opera, but I'm not capable of writing a libretto, or even an Opera at this point, so I'm going to do more research and look for a contact that does libretto writing. It will cost me money to commission the libretto, and a retail job won't pay for that.

The suffering artist . It's one of those things that you don't think about when you get a composition degree. I'm actually studying something practical to try to get a better job.

This is great. I had a a gay woman call me a "parlor room satanist" yesterday. I told her that it sounded about right! No one really cares that I'm a Satanist; it doesn't bother them, what bothers them is that I'm gay. They talk all the time about how I'm gay, while I'm off praying to the Dark Lord. Thank God they don't do lynchings or stake burnings anymore. "NEver Again the BUrning Times!" Not if you're gay.

Well, I'm off to do something else...

Well, I just got done with my first mature piece of classical music, and I've been up since about 5 and I'm very tired. I'm more relaxed because I'm not midway through a project, but canning the smokes has left me pretty uncomfortable this week. I've got a cup of coffee right now, and I'm planning next week's attack... I may decide to get some art supplies. I like doing inks, but I'm not impressed with the colored inks, so I may just buy some cheap water colors.

I tried some sumi-e and I just don't have the heart to draw bamboo shoots. This is no insult to sumi-e, but I'm not really a landscape artist. I'm more of a figure artist, and sumi-e is not well suited to figures. I tried the inks on thicker paper with better results, and ended up giving my brother a picture I did of Buddha. He's more Jon Kabat-Zinn than Lotus Sutra, but I didn't think a picture of John Kabat-Zinn would be very effective...

Also, for Mac users I recommend Voodoo Pad. What it does is create a series of documents linked together like a wiki or a hypertext page, and it's great to keep all my projects related together with. I have the free one and the functionality is just fine, but if you want to be able to add sound bytes or things like that you'll need the real one. I think it would be a great book this journal I've got on Voodoo Pad. Lots of little nuggets about splitting hairs in electronic music, nude art pictures, journal ranting, song critiques, all kinds of stuff. Great fun.

Well anyway, I'm going to take a nap now. It's pretty bad to be this bushed at lunch time, but I've been up 8 hours I guess. It feels like about 7 at night. Later.