Thanks to Zack, here’s a video of the premiere of “Our Father, Vindicate”.
Updates from January, 2010
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Our Father, Performed
michael
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Today's Lecture Is ...
michael
Some students and I were joking about how bad most professors are at giving lectures. They said that you could tell how well a lecture would go based on the introduction and the first slide.
So, in continuation of that joke, this post is the first semi-demi-annual contest, “Today’s Lecture Is … ” Post your rambling intro, and then the title of the first powerpoint slide, to what you would consider the worst lecture ever.
I’ll start:
Before we begin today’s lecture, I’d like to take just a few minutes to explain the grammatical differences between “who” and “whom”. I brought a brief powerpoint presentation, If someone could just hit the lights …
… and, there we go. Slide one:
The Linguistic History of Objective Cases, part 1: Sumaria
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Are Bad Excuses a "Flu-like Symptom"?
michael
Dear Students,
If you’re planning to ditch my class, not turn in any homework, then show up to the study session for the exam only to realize that you don’t know any of the material and are doomed to fail, decide to email me to let me know that you’ve had the swine flu and have been bed-ridden for the past two weeks and can you please take the exam late, please take just a minute to modify your facebook account to remove photos of you drinking heavily with friends for 5 consecutive nights last week.
Love,
Your ProfessorP.S. Seriously?
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Professionals, Again
michael
I spent yesterday editing down the tutorial video from the Our Father, Vindicate recording session with our very own Mr. Zack Mathers (so expect some swearing in the comments). For those of you who do not eagerly memorize every detail of my life with rapt attention and a pavlovian frenzy, I wrote a song, wanted to do a big recording session of the song, and the only way I could afford to do it was by getting a grant to fund the demo. To do that, we had to engage in some mild academic trickery, and tell them that the whole purpose of the recording session was to make an instructional video for students.
So, Zack brought some cameras along, recorded the whole session, and yesterday we editing all of that down into a 10-minute tutorial on how to record large-ensemble composer demos with no money down and only 8 singers.
I know I’ve said this before, but yesterday was another reminder: I am always shocked when people I know, people who are just, like, my people, friends, drinkin’ buddies, when they also turn out to be stone-cold awesome at what they do. I felt the same way the first time Aly edited something I had written (the proposal for this same grant, by the way). I felt the same way when June brought down a painting for my office. I felt the same way when other florists started ripping off Gretchen’s work and claiming it as their own (a true indicator of awesomeness). It’s been the same with Cory, Chad, Rosy, almost everybody (hey Bobby).
It’s always fun to get to see people who are your friends as they are perceived by their clients, and to realize that the reason they do what they do is because they do what they do. They didn’t just hang a shingle, they became professionals.
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Child of Sorrows
michael
For my songwriting class at CSULA, we have to write a different kind of song each week. This week, Da Blues.
Here it is. My staggeringly white attempt to write the blues. I had to resist the urge to make the whole song about this time I ordered a Chai Tea Latte at Starbucks, but got a Soy Latte instead. Oh Lord, why must I suffer.
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UPDATE
Finished it, here’s the full demo:
Child of Sorrows – FinalAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Child of Sorrows
I am a child of sorrows
The Good Lord won’t let die
I am a child of sorrows
The Good Lord won’t let die
Lord knows I’ve been trying
With whiskey and with rye
But I ain’t done suff’ring yet
I am a child of money
But that don’t mean a thing
I am a child of money
But that don’t mean a thing
She kicked me out at 17
And I ain’t seen her since,
Oh I ain’t done suff’ring yet
I married a good woman,
And you know I turned her bad
I married a good woman,
And you know I turned her bad
The joy I took away from her
Is the only joy I’ve had
Oh I ain’t done suff’ring yet
I went to see the preacher
About my heart of sin
I went to see the preacher
About my heart of sin
Well he looked me up
And he looked me down
And he kicked me out again
Said I ain’t done suff’ring yet,
No I ain’t done suff’ring yet,
Well I ain’t done suf’ring yet.
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That's a *&^ Idea
michael
Tonight was the first night of actual classes for my MM adventure. I think I’m going to start a list of things that profs at Cal State are allowed to say, that I would love to say in my classes, but never could. First on the list, the prof for Advanced Composition, talking about what made Beethoven such a compelling melody writer.
Play the first 4 notes of the 5th Symphony.
“Your hear that, nobody’s waiting around for the musical idea to show up. That’s a f’ing musical idea!”
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New Notes
michael
I took a risk yesterday, and it paid off in a huge way.
I met with the Dean of the school of music, and we negotiated a big shift in my responsibilities in the School of Music. I am stepping down from my role as Director of Small Groups, and taking on the role of Staff Composer. A big chunk of my job from now on will be to compose new music and do some arranging for the ensembles in our school. In the last year, I’ve had several ensemble directors come ask me to write or arrange something, and I’ve had to say no to some of them because of the time constraints, and because they didn’t have room in their individual budgets to pay for new music. This solves both problems in one glorious swoop. I now get to say “yes!”, they get to have new things written specifically for them, I have time to do it, and they don’t have to decide between paying for new music or paying for scholarships (or whatever else they spend money on).
I have loved my role at APU since day one, and I didn’t think it was possible for it to get even better, but this is like a dream come true.
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Music is Vast
michael
(NOTE: Some of you already saw this on Facebook. I really wanted to post this here instead, but the server was just going nuts the last few days, so I couldn’t. These kind of thinky thoughts totally belong at the Roadhouse, not on that trashy whore Facebook.)
If you took Intro to Music Tech from me in a previous semester, the class probably started out with my patented “You all suck at music, and will likely end up working at Walmart” speech. While I stand by that speech, and think that it is largely true (especially for you, Brandon), I feel as though it may have set the wrong tone for my class.
Instead, this year, I gave a different speech. Addison Road-ites will notice several recurring themes from my posts here, wrapped up in a tidy 5 minutes diatribe on Music and Technology.
So here it is: my opening speech to the incoming freshmen.
Music is vast. It is so much bigger than you think it is. It covers more things, runs deeper, any grasp you have on it is always too small. It will always be bigger than your experience in it.
Music is vast. I call myself a musician, and in the last 4 months that has meant playing keyboards for a national commercial, writing a modern composition for trumpet, piano, and laptop, conducting a choral recording session for another piece I wrote, playing keyboards live for 100 awesome fans at Hotel Cafe, teaching a younger player how to set a tap-delay for a guitar tone, leading worship, singing backing vocals on a demo, writing two songs for a musical, and playing piano for a bad j-pop album. All of those things are music. That’s just one summer, for one person, and you should all know that I am nowhere near the top of the heap when it comes to this industry. Other people are doing far more work than I am. But all of that is music.
Music is vast. It runs deep. It reaches out and strikes the soul, and the whole body resonates on that pitch. It reminds us, like nothing else can, that we are more than meat and bone, more than dust. We are the breath of God, created in His image, and just as he sang the world into being, we create in imitation of Him. We are the immortal echo of the eternal, living for just a little while in these clay jars, and music reminds us who we are. If you haven’t ever felt that, then I honestly have no idea why you’re here.
Music is vast, and it is shared. Music is the exchange of ideas. Melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, vibe, tone, tension, resolution – music is about the trading back and forth of ideas. And language is, frankly, a very bad tool for exchanging ideas about music. There’s a quote, attributed to Frank Zappa but probably not his, that says, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
Technology is the ink and paper of music. It is our best tool for exchanging ideas. If you have ideas worth sharing, and again I don’t know why you’re here unless you do, then technology is you best tool for capturing and sharing those ideas.
My goal is not to turn you into geeks and nerds; that will happen on its own. My goal is to turn you into musicians. That means being fluent in the language of music, which is, increasingly, the language of music technology. My goal is to help you learn to use technology so well that it lets you do what you really want to do, which is music. The technology should be transparent, it has to get out of the way, and let you be a musician.
Music is vast. It is broad and it is deep, and it’s way to early in your musical lives to start defining yourself in narrow ways. Don’t say, “I am this, not this” or “I do this, not this”. You have no idea yet who or what you can and will be. Be big! Be curious, be broad, be deep, be soul-ish and magnificent. Everything else in this world will conspire to make you small – don’t be complicit! Resist the urge to define yourself in small ways.
Be a musician. Be vast.
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APU has the Dead Sea Scrolls!
michael
Holy Crap!
APU just added a huge new piece to it’s library collection. The Dead Sea Scrolls! This is, like, huge. Massive. Like, on the national map in a big way. Anybody wanna sneak in to the library holding room and check them out with me? I totally have a faculty key!
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Phat Beat
michael
We’re recording an album this week, of the touring small group from APU. It’s going to be pretty good.
We’re doing one song that’s a deep R&B, hip-hop groove. In pre-production, I built this massive phat 808 electronic kit loop. We tracking scratch vocals yesterday, and the group went nuts over the loop. I mean, seriously nuts.
I guess they didn’t realize that all the great hip-hop songs are actually programmed by middle-aged white guys living in the suburbs.
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