Entry 1: Once more onto the battlefield!

It is really great to be back at this again.

I've just finished writing a piece for piano and violin which I wrote in a whirlwind bout of composition...Wake up, sit down, write....an impossible amount of time passes...And the composition's done! That's what happened when I wrote my fugue for 18th century counterpoint. I had lots of time to get it done, but instead I wrote it in kind of a blur, then went back afterwards and tweaked it until I had it up to my satisfaction. Of course I dented the tree population slightly because my printer is a dinosaur- a vegitarian (maybe even vegan!) dinosaur, since it eats paper covered with ink and perhaps the occasional fly. In the winter, printers have to be opportunists and eat whatever they can while their owner is gone over the holidays. Anyway, I had printed off the first version when I went back and edited it, and then had to print it off again but the ink turned red part of the way through printing it off soooo I had to change the ink and try again...In short, it took a lot more conscious effort to make my dinoprinter work than it did to write the fugue, and that was a task in and of itself.

But anyway, back to composition.

PIANO?!? AHHHHH!

See, it was a blessing when I finished keyboard harmony. I enjoyed the class thoroughly but unfortunately was not very gifted at playing anything beyond good old block chords...And they were played crudely and with no finesse. BAHM BAHM BAHM, BAHM BAHM BAHM, BAMMA BAMMA BAMMA BAMMA, BAHM BAHM BAHM. That's me playing "Hot Cross Buns." Heck, put that on vinyl and it'll sell for a mint. NOT.

So playing piano, for me, is pretty darn tricky. Writing for piano isn't too hard. Writing GOOD music for piano is incredibly difficult because it involves writing music which isn't necessarily block chords in the left hand and a single line of melody in the right hand. So when I'm trying to write good music, I usually err on the side of caution until I get swept up in what I'm writing and create something which is impossible to play. Not just impossible, but incredibly impossible. Pianists just haven't evolved enough to be able to play my pieces, the lazy bums. C'mon! Let's see you pianists start sprouting three additional fingers on each hand!!

So it'll be interesting, trying to write something which is physically possible, and not too simple. Because if I let myself do something simple, like what we discussed in class, it would be because I'm not challenging myself enough. I need to learn how to write for piano and since we've got an assignment instructing us to do this, now's gotta be the time. So I won't allow myself to slip through any possible loopholes and I'm just going to have to try and try again, ask some poor bugger to play my piece just to see if it's even playable and hope that in the end I can find the meaning of life.

Wait...What?

Piece ideas!!

After consulting a close friend who has wanted me to write something not exactly for him but on an idea he's come up with, I've decided to do three different works based on an epic battle we had one summer. When I was in high school I attended the UNB Music camp over the summer which is where I met Dan, the friend I just mentioned. Because about 50% of the camp is actually making music and the other half is making mischeif, a pop bottle war happened. There were two teams and after everyone had pop bottles, pizza box shields or rolled up cardboard to make swords, they basically went nuts attacking one another.

I didn't take part- I was videotaping.

But the next year I went back Dan and I decided to spearhead another battle and spent our spare time convincing the younger kids (since we were two of only a few 'seniors' there who'd witnessed the first battle) to sneak out at night with us, armed with pop bottles, and stage another battle. We collected as many bottles as we could and late one night (after curfew because we were totally rebels) we snuck out the kids and pop bottles and staged another battle.

Dan was the leader of his team: Russia. Of course, he was renamed Czar Dan Dmitry Shostakovich of Russia.

I was the leader of my team: the Vatican, and I was renamed Pope Jess II of the Vatican.

It was a fun time, though in my opinion, I was outmatched. See, I had two of the little 500ml bottles. Dan, who was my main opponent, had two of those hefty Mott's Clamato bottles. Not only are they harder, but that plastic is thicker and those bottles have corners. CORNERS. And where I had taken the lids off my bottles to allow the bottle to give and not actually handicap whoever I was bludgeoning, he had the caps screwed on so the air pressure inside the bottle made them even harder.

In the end, we decided on a truce after it was pointed out how much of an advantage he had. Well, not really, he completely schooled me, and I'll make the piece accurate to that. BUT we decided for an end story that the Pope was shot and Russia disbanded. Kind of a truce. We all abandoned our weapons in a recycling bin and snuck back into the residence.

Oddly enough, just a minute after I got back in my room I heard a knock at the door. I looked through the peephole and felt my guts turn to rubber. Low and behold, one of the camp counsellors, the people in charge of keeping us in line while we're in the residence during the night, isat the door- she was doing one of her rounds to make sure no one was being loud or out in the halls and she saw my light on so she decided to come see me...I open the door and she took about two or three minutes to thank me for being a friend to the younger kids who were a bit nervous about being at the week-and-a-half long camp, and for helping out the counsellors by keeping track of said kids, making sure none of them were out of line and etc. Heh. Not only were we not caught, one of the two ringleaders was congratulated for their efforts to keep the kids from breaking the rules. Bingo.

So the piece will be in three movements, as it's supposed to be. The name of the piece comes from this music camp as well- we were divided into groups and had to meet every morning to get a schedule of the day's events. It was encouraged that our groups have names so we went all out and every person in the group gave one syllable to add to this monster word which would be our group name:

Phtha-he-kwa-gnu-phblorph-i-bob-flug-schnit.

Phthahekwagnuphblorpvibobflugschnit. I think 'kwa' was my addition, and 'gnu' was Dan's. Here's a pronunciation guide:

FTHAY-hee-kwaa-gnoo-fblorpv-AYE-bob-FLU(yodle the 'u')G-shnit. You accent 'Phtha,' 'i' and 'flug,' and you kind of yodle the 'oo' sound of 'flug.' There's also an umlaut over the 'u' in 'flug' and a ~ over the 'i' for no real reason. Perhaps to show emphasis, we never decided why.

Three movements?

Phthahekwagnu: the gathering. Gathering children en masse to take part in this epic battle, and, of course, our weapons- pop bottles. Prepared piano, anyone? Oh yes, I'm thinking pop bottles inside the piano, at least just for this movement. It'll start out probably fairly tame, and then become more involved and heavy as it goes on. The 'gnu' and 'kwa' themes will be introduced, to represent the Czar and the Pope.

Phblorpvibob: The battle- Kwa versus Gnu, Pope versus Czar. Polytonality? I think so. It'll be wreckless (a word which has often baffled me, seeing as doing something wreckless usually ends in some type of wreck) and brash. Hopefully!

Flugschnit: The aftermath and, to quote Dan, with "lingering social repercussions." In other words, he hasn't let me forget that I lost. So the Gnu theme will be triumphant and a bit Kwa a bit wistful- injured and at a loss. Maybe I'll make it a bit aleatoric by using a lot of octave displacement in the Kwa theme, which will be in the lower register of the piano. The Gnu theme'll sound somewhat distant though celebratory, in the upper register, as though they're partying it up in the distance.

Knowing myself, I'll probably change my mind umpteen times before the project's due, and write something I really like the day before it's due, which has happened many times in the past. I'll be plugging away at something then BAM, -the- idea hits so I take that and run as fast as I can with it. Actually, I think that's how I've written some of my favourite compositions. Bah. If something better comes up, it'll have to be pretty darn fantastic because I really like this idea.

Now to stop writing and start writing.