Roots soak up water

Haven't been up to much lately except some math homework... nothing like calculating some least squares polynomials by hand!

I got that book out from the library, Roots of the Classical by Peter Van Der Merwe. I'm not far into it, but it's so far interesting at least. It's not written in a repulsing style, for one, which is always nice. If I had much more time, I might consider it an easy read, but I'm only on page 12 of 470. My library's copy is from 2004 and it's all nice and new... the aesthetics of a book are always part of the reading experience!

Well, I'm gonna keep reading and I've got to finish up my math homework... and maybe I can work on my novel a bit tonight.

Classical music is da bomb

Somebody on the music forum posted a link to this interesting article: "Classical music could even become the new rock'n'roll". Well, I'm not sure it will become the new rock'n'roll, but I don't think I'd mind it! But I do agree with much of what the article says, such as:

The upshot was a deliberate renunciation of popularity. The audience that mattered to modernists (even the many who saw themselves as socialists) ceased to be the general public and increasingly became other composers and the intellectual, often university-based, establishment that claimed to validate the new music, not least through its influence over state patronage. Any failure of the music to become popular was ascribed not to the composer's lack of communication but the public's lack of understanding.

There's a book mentioned in the article that I now am interested in checking out, so maybe I Am A Strange Loop will have to take a break for a week or two.

I tried last night to work on my novel, The Game of Gynwig, but I scrapped everything I wrote... which wasn't much. It was hard to get back into the story even after reading through my notes on what's supposed to happen next. I think I'm just going to cut whatever chapter I was working on short and start a new scene. I'm really going to have to go back and read through everything I've done so far though. How annoying! Well, maybe not everything... but I gotta get my mind back into it.

Music but no soda

I got about one minute of music written today. Or two minutes I guess. One and a half, I'll compromise. I spent about 3 hours working on that piece "Hour by Hour" ... I'm still not sure how long it will be, it could go on and on... right now it's at 8.5 minutes, which is pretty long for a piece by me, so I'd rather it come to an end before or around 10 minutes, but I'll let it go on for as long as it wants to.

Uh oh, I've only got one can of soda left, and I'm going to drink it after I post this blog, which means I'll have to start giving my one dollar bills to vending machines. It's so sad when it comes to that...

I'm off to go read some more of The Moonstone, because I know blog readers care about what I'm going to do next... Oh yeah, blogging daily!

The Moonstone is funny

I read a bit more of The Moonstone... I'm only on page 14 of about 400, but what I've read so far is funny. This is something written over one hundred years ago in the 1860s, and I don't know how much the author Wilkie Collins intended it, but the current narrator of the story just has a wonderfully funny personality. It almost seems like the sort of story that should be read aloud. Then again, maybe I just thought the opening chapters were funny because I'm tired.

I don't have a whole lot of homework left, so I hope I can spend some time with music this weekend. I checked out an interesting book from the library which is completely about Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony. Woohoo! I also still have some plastic-wrapped classical music CDs that need listening...

The music of the night

I'm up late doing math homework... hopefully for the last time this semester and maybe for the last time in my life! (But probably not!)

Following my failed duet attempt, I tried writing a violin piece, which I ended up turning into four-hand piano piece which I might call "Headache" because it gave me a headache. It's very polytonal until the ending. At first I was going to scrap that too, but I noticed that it was playing back in my head later on, so I'll probably post it eventually. It's sort of like "A Little Harp Music" in that there's no striking melody, just a bunch of recurring patterns.

I also uploaded a piece I wrote over a year ago called "Serenade for Strings No 2" because it is a serenade for strings... and it is my second one. You can hear it right here.

Ack, I've got a nasty annoying cough...

Evolution is dumb

I wrote a short violin and clarinet duet this morning, but I don't like how it sounds with those instruments. I've explored other combinations, and right now it's a violin duet. It still needs some heavy MIDI data editing, and maybe I'll write more movements to it... but probably not. And maybe I'll just scrap the whole thing.

Hmmm... the Dow closed above 13,000. I hardly know what exactly that means, but I like how everyone tries to analyze it and draw conclusions from it.

Scientists say they may have found a planet that has a bunch of water on it and is just the right temperature to support life. It's only hundreds of trillions of miles away. So what would aliens look like? What if... they look pretty much like us? What if among the dazzling variety of life that evolution can conjure up, the human form is a design that pops up over and over again across galaxies? Maybe there'll be some variations on it, but what if evolution, if its paths from hundreds of earth-like planets are compared, tends to take the same kind of route all the time? Would that be amazing, or not surprising?

Phlegm and modern music

Oh, the nasal congestion! The pressure! I bear a painful headache...

I hate whining... on my blog at least... but it's hard to focus on anything when your head feels like a balloon that needs to be popped.

On the music forum I live at, there's been a great discussion on modern music. It is right here. It's a really long read and the conversation goes all over the place, but when I wasn't doing homework today I was blathering on in that thread. It sometimes reminds me of The Fountainhead. I want to make an opera out of that book, I hope I live to see it go out of copyright. Actually, I guess I could write it and just not release it until the book goes out of copyright.

Here's a quote from myself from the aforementioned forum thread:

I also hearby proclaim that many modern composers who try, and perhaps succeed, to be "innovative" (whatever exactly that means) purely for its own sake will wind up being largely forgotten and their names will never enjoy the glory dead composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Dvorak, etc. currently enjoy, and will enjoy for some time. Composers like Schoenberg will never gain such popularity. In fact, I shall also make the bold claim that in the next 50 to 75 years, as my generation and the one after takes over, there will be a bit of an artistic renaissance that will echo romanticism, and the atonal "innovative" music, the Brillo boxes and paint blobs in the art galleries, the randomly designed statues of spheres and loops and triangles, will be much more neglected, because, as it turns out, not that many like them.

Oh boy, let's see if I end up being right or wrong. Though, of course, technically if I do end up being wrong, I could always argue about the definition of "renaissance" so it's a win-win. I always win. I actually said that in a dream once... "I always win"... it was really weird. I was fighting over a computer and when I won I turned around and said "I always win" quite boldly. That darn self-righteous determined subconscious! Dreams can be so awesome. Oh, I just got an idea for a semi-related short story...

Book of the musical?

Woohoo, I'll be seeing PDQ Bach at the Kennedy Center in less than a month, on May 11th!

I started reading The Moonstone... got through the prologue. Talk about progress, eh? Maybe I'll start chapter one after I finish blogging.

I have a math question: x+x = x*2 ... x*x = x^2 ... x^x = x?2

I think when I start writing my musical this summer or whenever I get around to it, I will write a companion book about my writing process of the musical and about the structure of it all. It will contain the score and an explanation of why I did everything I did. Would anyone buy such a thing? (Besides me?)

Well, I spent the day working at the library, chatting in the NSS chat room, and doing math homework, so I feel a bit unproductive. And I've acquired a cough and a runny nose, perhaps I have a bit of cold. Beats a stomach flu. I got an email a few days ago from my university's health services saying that a stomach flu was going around. Better not come this way!

Two more weeks of classes! (And then exams.)

The game of my dreams

I had a dream last night that I've had once before a year or two ago... it's about a video game that does not yet exist but it's extremely fun to play. It's hard to describe, but it's like a cross between The Sims and Super Mario. You're in this weird open-ended fantasy world in which you have the ability to interact with just about anything, but the game somehow helps you develop some sort of story. In The Sims you're restricted to one house and you have to keep a bunch of needs balanced, but in the game in my dreams you have to keep some strange story elements balanced and you basically end up creating small stories, all of which end up having something to do with a larger over-arching story... but the key is that the story is completely original, created by me, the player.

It's like being given action figures when you're young and you make up a story with them, only the computer game in my dreams is far better than a stiff smiling piece of plastic. I read somewhere that The Sims was originally called something like The Dollhouse, so Will Wright perhaps felt some connection with childhood toys and imagination as well, and realized the computer could be used as simply a way of creating a much more profound set of toys.

Well, I wanted to blather about that so that someday I can read back over it and be inspired I guess. I don't want to forget the idea. However, it seems rather infeasible. One of the biggest problems lies in the artificial intelligence that would be required, especially the fact that computers cannot understand human language. How would a character communicate in the computer game in my dream? I can't quite capture it. In The Sims and in The Movies characters just mumble so you could interpret them as anything (and, my, the mumbling Sims are much more compelling and entertaining than the mumbling actors in The Movies). How can one create a compelling original story when the characters can't talk? I can think of a few solutions, but none of them would be a magnificent as if the computer could figure out how to talk by itself, which is a long way off! We probably won't even have true talking computers in 100 years.

Well, I was going to start reading The Moonstone tonight, but I've blathered for so long that I think I really ought to get to bed... gotta go to work in a few hours!

Mozart in the evening

Today I enjoyed two of Mozart's fine violin concertos, the fourth and the fifth, to be precise, via CD. The scores of just about all of Mozart's works are available for free (and legally) here, so I was able to follow along. I'd love to use my Garritan Solo Strad virtual violin and Garritan Personal Orchestra to perhaps do a virtual rendition of one of these concertos for my own personal learning, but in all honestly I'll probably never get around to it. I'll definitely write at least one movement of a violin concerto though... eventually.

I also spent some time playing around today with a "clone ensemble" VST plugin. It basically allows you to take one voice recording and turn it into a semi-convincing choir. Nothing you could render Beethoven's 9th with, but enough to make it seem as if a small crowd were singing together. I could only play around with some of the features in the demo, the full version is around $25. I'll buy it if I have any projects come up in which I need a small group to sing something...

A book called The Black Swan is now out and about, and I'll order it from Amazon.com as soon as I'm finished with I Am a Strange Loop. Looks like a very interesting book, and I devoured the author's last book, Fooled by Randomness. In fact, I probably devoured it too much.

I wonder how much it would cost to have one of my smaller pieces of music played and recorded so that I could sell it on a CD... e.g. one of my string quartets or my trio for harp, flute and oboe... would that cost a couple hundred dollars? Would it exceed $1,000 for the recording equipment? Wouldn't that be awesome though? I could write several full string quartets to fill up a CD if I knew it was going to be played and recorded by real players. Probably still way too expensive though, I might as well save up for a full orchestra for my 50th birthday. Funny, I use to plan to never have to pay to get my music played... but, well, somebody's got to.

Lastly, I've been thinking about tidying up some of my scores and putting them up for sale on Lulu.com. I'd like to have a printed record of them myself, and maybe I'll make a buck or two if anyone else buys them. I've had people ask me for sheet music for my music before, but I'm not sure if they'd be willing to pay something to get it. Saying "yes, my sheet music is available at Lulu.com" is at least better than saying "nope!"

Blogging daily...

I've been able to keep up blogging daily for... well, not that long actually, but since I've started this blog at least. So if I've been able to force myself to find time to do this everyday, why shouldn't I also force myself to at least write a paragraph per day for my novel, The Game of Gynwig? Maybe I should turn the novel into a blog like this and then blog it daily...

I certainly don't want to reformat what I've already done, though... I guess I could just copy/paste, like I do when I compose.

On second thought, it would probably destroy the writing style... writing prose for a novel is much different than just blathering off the top of your head like I'm doing here... although I suppose a good many authors seem to do that, don't they?

Well, I can blather daily, I just lack content most of the time.

Podcasting...

I haven't done much podcasting, only several experimental comedy shows. The free service I was using, called ClickCaster, is going to stop being free next month. Obviously their business model of offering free disk space and bandwidth just didn't work, and I'm not sure why it would. The point is that I'll have to either find some other free podcasting hosting service out there or host them on my own website. I wouldn't much like paying for the bandwidth myself, but with my podcasts' unpopularity, that probably wouldn't be a problem. I'm certainly not going to pay ClickCaster anything!

Feynman lectures...

I was browsing the library between classes today and noticed a 12 CD set of Feynman lectures. I had actually never heard his voice before. The lectures are from the 1960s, so they're certainly outdated, but perhaps still interesting. I'm listening to the first lecture now, and I'm already completely confused. Hmmm... I guess I could let it play while I sleep so that I will learn unconsciously. But I'd hate to have an "omelette du fromage" day like Dexter, which everyone knows subliminal learning can inadvertently cause.

A new short story

After my math exam tonight, I found an old short story I had started on my computer. I finished it up and now I'm not sure what magazine to send it to. It's not science fiction, it's sort of contemporary fantasy... much like the movie Stranger Than Fiction, but better because that movie was sort of dumb.

I really want to try my hand at writing a fantasy short story, all my ideas for science fiction end up having been taken... I have two science fiction short stories that I started, but they're incomplete. One of them I will scrap completely, and I'm not quite sure about the other one. On the one hand, I think it would be interesting to finish, but on the other, the ideas in it are probably already taken. Oh well.

Oh, I also have a flash-fiction piece that I could try submitting somewhere. It's only about 300 or 400 words.

I wish I had more time to dedicate to my wonderful creativity instead of devoting it to useless test-taking and homework and lecture-hearing. (How arrogant!) I believe high school and college, as they are now, should be completely abolished. After middle school, teenagers should begin part-time work, and making real money, while getting a useful education that links with their work. (In other words, writing an essay on Shakespeare or Huckleberry would never be done again because it is utterly and completely useless.) This useful education should be focused on actual education and not an attempt to have the students prove how well they know something (no grades)... what they know and don't know will emerge in the work habits which will determine their salary, so they'll be a greater incentive to learn (and they won't be wasting time being taught useless crap that they'll never use). This sort of system would work much better, and teenagers would be much less moody and depressed, which is most likely caused by the older people (teachers) wasting their time.

Argh.

What a fun rant! You agree with me, don't you?

Time to read The Moonstone

I finished Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke yesterday. It is nothing special, I wasn't too impressed. Oh well, I'm going to move on to Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone now, a classic mystery novel from the 1800's.

I also checked out some virtual music books by David Cope from the library. I doubt I'll have much time to spend with them, but perhaps just skimming through the pages will give some good ideas about something.

Hmmm... not much else going on. I've got a math exam today, so I better try to sleep before studying as much as I can... wish me luck!

Wait a second, here's a thought that just popped into my head. If you have three points, to make them all equally distant from each other you'd form a triangle. If you had four points, you form a pyramid. What about five points? I can't visualize any solution... do we need another spacial dimension? Hmmm... something to sleep on.

Oh, wait, duh. That's the touching spheres problem.

Book Quotes

I started a fourth (or fifth, I've lost count) blog last night. The blog is dedicated to book quotes, thus I am calling it... "Book Quotes". It shall basically consist of quotes that stood out to me from books, both fiction and non-fiction (though probably more non-fiction will be mentioned since it tends to be more thought-provoking). Here is a link to the blog, and they'll be a link on the side bar as well. Think that's enough blogs for a while? I don't think I have anymore unique templates to use. Only this blog, the main blog on the main page, and the "Stuff I Found" blog will be updated regularly, the others are dependent on my whim.

Well, I'm going to go read about pattern recognition or something... bye.

Arthur C. Clarke disappoints

I am almost finished Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and it seems pretty stupid, so I am a bit disappointed. Maybe something exciting will happen in the last fifteen pages, but so far the revealed explanations for things are way too supernatural for me to go "oh, wow!" and the ideas presented seem cliche nowadays. Somebody had told me that this book was one of Arthur C. Clarke's greatest stories, but I sure hope not.

After this book, I'll have to go back to some Orson Scott Card for a while... I still have four or five books left to read in the Ender's series. Or perhaps I'll go to a mystery novel, the classic tale of The Moonstone. Yeah, I'll probably do that and take a break from scifi for a few weeks. And then I can turn The Moonstone into a musical... actually I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already done that.

Finished planning musical's story

It was a bit of an arduous day, but I did manage to finish planning out The Kidnapping of Belmount story. There are eighteen "chapters" or "episodes" in all, though that could of course change. If each of these episodes translates into at least five minutes of music, then the entire musical will be at least 90 minutes long, which wouldn't be bad at all for a first musical composed with no financial incentive!

I must finish composing my "Hour By Hour" orchestral piece first, though.

No crash!

I've had quite a lot of homework lately, so haven't had much time to do much else. However, I did think of a good ending to The Kidnapping of Belmount, so perhaps I can finish planning out that today.

Obviously my computer did not crash, so I'm somewhat happy about that...

I still have a bunch of homework that I must finish by tonight, so it probably won't be an exciting day.

Please computer, don't crash!

After classes today I spent a few hours working on my latest piece of music, currently called "Hour by Hour" ... I am almost finished with it, perhaps only a few more hours of work are needed. I am quite pleased with it and I look forward to adding it to the site when it is finished and polished. I think if you count all the original melodies that are in it, this piece may indeed have the most. I'm not sure how long it will end up being... right now it's about six minutes.

I got those classical music CDs in the mail today, so I'll have to listen to those when I get the chance... woohoo! I also got the full score to Holst's Planets! A very kind and giving member of the Northern Sound Source forum mailed it to me after a little contest he posted on the forum. This score is awesome! Holst's orchestration is brilliant, I can't wait to study it more. Within the coming months I hope to perhaps render a demo of Venus or Mercury with GPO. Wouldn't that be nice?

Last week my computer almost crashed when Windows wouldn't start up. I finally got it working again, and quickly saved my important files (30 GB worth) onto my iPod. Isn't it awesome that an iPod can be used like that? Good thing I've got the 80 GB model... it would be awesome if they came out with 120 GB model... I'd have to buy it... maybe... then again, it would probably be too expensive.

Anyway, I'm going to shut down my computer tonight and keep my fingers crossed that it will boot again tomorrow without any scary flaws... otherwise I'll be quite in trouble (unless of course I can fix it the same way I did last time). So... good luck to myself I suppose.

Until tomorrow (I hope) ...

Different Wizard Walk main page?

Whew, I did math homework (and sleep) almost all day!

Joshua Bell, the violinist, did a little experiment in a metro station in Washington, D.C., which I blogged about in the "Stuff I Found" blog, so I sort of did a little rant about its snobbishness.

I've been thinking of changing the main page of Wizard Walk to some sort of site map, so that instead of being thrust onto the first page you'd see a web of options on what I've got on my site, such as the blogs, the music pages, whatever. It might make everything more easy to navigate for newcomers... I really don't want to confuse everyone with a big main blog and then all these links on side menus that people might not even notice. I'm just not sure how intuitive it all is. So... a site map on the first page might make things easier to see.

Forget the whole "until I doth blog again" ... that's just stupid. Let's keep it simple.

Until tomorrow...

A Musical Perhaps?

I've been planning out a story which I imagine being a musical... it's called The Kidnapping of Belmount and the draft outline is about 60% complete. It is about a prisoner who is released from prison by a wizard who hires him to kidnap the princess.

I really need to get back to work on my novel though, The Game of Gynwig. I've been taking a nice long break on that, haven't I? I can't even remember what exactly is supposed to happen next, I'll have to find my notes.

I've been putting some music videos on my YouTube channel. The whole notion of music visualization is quite suddenly captivating!

I finally did get my hands on Hofstadter's new book, I Am A Strange Loop. I've only finished the first two chapters, but I'm considering starting another "Book Quote" blog because I keep making notes on interesting points I come across while reading that I'd like to comment on.

On the fiction side of things, I'm about 66% percent through Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, a very thought provoking science fiction book, which is a great contrast to the pathetic horrible torture I endured while reading Time's Eye, which he wrote with Stephen Baxter. Time's Eye is quite possibly the worst book ever written and it made me fantasize about book burnings. Childhood's End, however, is way on the other end of the spectrum... at least it is so far. The ending better be good... it's one of those books in which many things depend on a well thought out ending.

On the music front, I've been listening to my library's collection of Sondheim musicals, and tonight's treat was Follies while I labored away on some Computer Science homework. It's not a bad musical, but it's not nearly as catchy as some of Sondheim's other work, like Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, but I do remember hearing some nice tracks, though there names are not yet ingrained in my memory. Next up, I'll try listening to his musical called Passion. Then again, I am expecting some classical music I ordered from Amazon to arrive some time this week, so it may have to go on the backburner as I rock out with Mozart or whatever I ordered... they were having a sale, $3 a CD for some of them... one CD I ordered was Carmina Burana by good old Carl Orff... fantastic choirs in his music! I also ordered the infamous Symphonie Fantastique, which I remember enjoying but haven't heard for a loooong time, and some French symphonic poems, including the infamous Sorcerer's Apprentice! Woohoo! So I guess I have to give those a listen sometime.

Wow, I didn't mean to blather so much. I think what I'll do is try to blather on this blog daily, and then do a weekly briefing on the main page. Good idea, no?

Over and out. Should I keep saying that? Let's try something else for this blog... how about: Later. Hmmmm... that's overdone... how about: Until I doth blog again... ooh, that sounds nice, especially since it's grammatically incorrect, isn't it? Yeah, let's use that...

Until I doth blog again...

Another blog

Hope you don't mind yet another blog... not many people read my blogs anyway, mostly just me.

Anyway, the point of this blog is for when I have a little thought or update that's just not important enough for the main page. The "Stuff I Found" blog will be totally dedicated to links and videos I come across that seem interesting, while this blog is totally dedicated to my own blather about myself.

My hope is to update this blog at least once a day... let's see how long that lasts. Well, obviously when I don't have access to a computer it won't happen, but otherwise I should be able to find at least one little stupid thing to say!

I can't wait to blather!