String Quartets for Christmas, vol. 2; NeverWinter mod

I've just finished a set of five arrangements of carols for string quartet and uploaded them to SibeliusMusic.com. They have a quick upload to availability turn around and I've already sold one piece in just five days of putting up my page, so I'm hopeful I'll get a little more action going this way.

A Neverwinter mod called "Moonlight Path" asked a few composers, including me, to write a bit of music for the game and so I'm plugging away at some sketches. The first is for a village where the music needs to imply safety and quiet. My first effort was a little too happy, so I'm trying for something with less movement in it. Did I mention the coders are in Scandanavia? I love the internet.

SibeliusMusic.com

I found an easier way to distribute scores that are unpublishable for one reason or another by major publishers: SibeliusMusic.com. Things to enjoy (besides my lovely music, of course): a large variety and number of scores (over 40000 at the moment), and active and chatty community of composers, nicely organized personal websites, and ease of presentation and distribution.

I submit to MusicNotes.com, a digital sheet music publisher, but they don't accept everything because it really needs to generate income for them. SibeliusMusic runs on the model of composer-as-customer with upgradeable services, etc... Typical but not unfair. I think I like it-- I've posted over a dozen scores already and hopefully will have some encouraging results.

New Track, Christmas Quartets, HTML fun

I posted a new track that I wrote as a possible replacement for a temp track that needed to be replaced in a one minute film. Another composer beat me to the deadline (at least, that what I believe happened) so the director didn't use my track. It sort of works as a one minute piano concerto even though some of the pauses carefully timed into the track have no visuals to make sense of them.

Three new Christmas carol arrangements for string quartet have also "appeared" in the last week and are available for purchase (I email pdfs). I sent them to musicnotes.com to see if they are interested. I should create recordings of them for demos, but I don't feel like working on that right now. Hopefully the first page of the full score available as a tif will be enough for a taste of each piece.

I dipped into HTML and JavaScript for the first time in many, many months. I saw a very nicely set up site owned by David Johns, a composer for games that has a nice sense of color and especially timing. I was impressed and inspired to improve my own work. And to add a media player to my film music page so that visitors could hear more than one piece playing over and over in the background. The page now has a custom made "skin" with four simple controls to use to navigate a short playlist. Fun. Thanks, David!

A NeverWinter modder contacted me to write for his game modules, but he must be busy because he didn't return my last email. I think this is common in young programmers-- lots of time spent writing code and playtesting, and less energy for putting together a package of images, movies, etc. for composers and others who need to see their work.

In other news, I'm working on "The Lord of the Rings Symphony" by Howard Shore with the GR Symphony Chorus. I knew there would be lots of screaming of scales and endless held chord clusters, but I didn't realize from the recordings (which I know too well) how artless the writing is. The effect works in the context of the movies, but other composers could have done a better job, I think. HS thinks chords and fingers with a little color thrown in. This lead in this case to lots of superfluity (I'm tempted to pun) and unfinished editing. Ah well, the symphony organization will make lots of money on this one.

Katrina; Clara Barton

I can't add anything of any significance to all that has been said about the disaster, so I just offer my useless feelings of sadness and what money I can through the aid agencies. My wife is the principal at a local Catholic school where they have just taken in the kids in a family (or two?) displaced by the hurricane. This is the right thing to do. The upper administration is trying to control the process, but they seem to have proven time and again that their heads are in the wrong place and so I wouldn't trust them to be terribly helpful. This seems to me to be a parish community-level missionary endeavor and should be handled that way.

In my professional life, I seem to be getting pieces published more regularly, which is nice. Rob Child is working on Clara Barton, the last I heard from him, so hopefully this job will indeed come through and make up for the income loss of not teaching in the music department at Aquinas College this year. I miss the students and the subjects, but I don't miss the across-town drive four days a week.

Some local church music directors got together last week to hear compositions for church use by area composers. There were five of us presenting and I heard a lot of nice pieces, some of which I absolutely sure I'll use. I wasn't terribly well organized in that my samples were shrunk to save on paper (20 pages down to 4 legal size double sided-- but wait, who cares?) whereas others gave out much better looking presentations of their work. I don't pay enough attention to image, I guess. Still, the music doesn't care what it is printed on as long as it is readable, and the audience gave a good reading of mine and everyone else's stuff. I think the things I contributed that had the most impact were psalm settings that borrowed idioms from spirituals and jazz-- I believe that the psalms of lamentation are particularly suited to this emotional style of writing and this was born out in the response to these compositions. We'll see if the publishers like them or not, I guess.

I see Ophelia is threatening Florida-- looks like some more lamentation may be in order.