A Great Tool for Writing

If you’re a Mac user and you do any writing at all, you should take a look at Scrivener. At first, you’ll think it’s a word processor, but you’ll find it’s a lot more interesting and useful. My 30-day trial period just ended, and I paid for it without hesitation.

Basically, Scrivener makes it easy to break your writing down hierarchically. So, if you organize your writing around an outline, even a really simple one in your head, Scrivener makes it easy to put your ideas where they fit within the outline, to be fleshed out in situ or moved around, or whatever.

I discovered Scrivener by way of 43 Folders, a blog I follow to satisfy my inner geek. Merlin Mann does a better and more thorough job of explaining it than I do, so feel free to just jump over to his review.

By the way, Merlin’s non-linear approach to writing sounds a lot like the way I compose. I think it’s a good way to work actually.

If you write like I do (and I pray that you do not), you have a messy approach to drafting that is iterative, intuitive, and far from linear. You do a brain dump, then type a little, then research a little, then type a little more, then move a bunch of stuff around, then groan aloud, then 80% start over and so on until something is done. Yes, it would be more tidy if we all followed the mandate of our elementary school teachers and wrote perfect 5-paragraph essays straight from a completed outline. But, such is life. And Scrivener seems to get that.

What It Does

There are several views of your work. The basic working view is a folder tree on the left, representing your outline, or whatever kind of hierarchy you have, and your writing on the right.

So, let’s say you’re writing a little biography of Bartók. You might create several outline items in the tree on the left, say, Early Life, Conservatory, Folk Music Collecting, Works, Emigration. Under “Works”, you can then put any number of sub-items (piano, orchestral, chamber, choral, etc.), and so on. If you start out inspired to write about Bartók’s emigration, it’s now very easy to just start there. Later, you may decide to be clever and open with his emigration. So, you just drag that item up to where you want it in the tree.

When you’ve filled in all your content, Scrivener will export the whole thing into whatever real word processor you like for final editing and polishing.

There’s another view, which is kind of interesting. It’s a corkboard, with all of your notes presented as index cards pinned to it. You can double click any index card to drill down to any sub-items on a new corkboard.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Scrivener can do. In the past month, I’ve used it to prepare a pre-concert talk, and I’m now using it to organize the lyrics for the musical I’m now working on. (And I’m using it to write this post.)

A Baffling Little Tidbit

Joshua Kosman has a pretty funny anecdote about a know-it-all violinist musician. I suppose her ignorance shouldn’t be surprising, given her bad attitude, but…. sheesh!

Concert Attire

Here’s what my almost-four-year-old says to me in the car on the way down to San Jose for the Letter to Hungary performance:

Dad, is that a special towel that you wear for concerts?

He’s referring to what might be the only elegant piece of clothing I own, which is a sport jacket from Jhane Barnes.

Excerpts Posted

As promised, I’ve put up some excerpts of last week’s performance of Letter To Hungary. You’ll find them on this page.

Enjoy.

Performance Report

Letter to Hungary received it’s U.S. premiere in San Jose last Saturday. A brilliant performance by the Mission Chamber Orchestra.

It has been many years since I’ve enjoyed hearing my own music performed this much. Part of it has to do with it being a second performance, as opposed to a premiere. I’m historically (hysterically) too nervous and stressed out at premieres to actually enjoy them.

But mainly, it’s about confidence. Most of my premieres have been under-rehearsed. That’s just the way it is with the new piece on the concert. I’ve gotten used to that. I’m usually happy with the performance anyway, because I care about the overall effect of a piece more than whether the violas cut off right on the downbeat. But when something’s under-rehearsed, everyone knows it, and everyone wonders where the big train wreck is going to happen, and they know it’s going to happen. So, it’s tense. I don’t like tense.

I was thrilled with the Budapest premiere of this piece, which was carried largely by nervous energy. It was exciting and well-received, but just a little rough around the edges, only because of a simple lack of rehearsal time.

In this case, rehearsal time was ample. I had been to one of the later rehearsals, which knocked my socks off, and I witnessed conductor Emily Ray sweating details of the sort that normally go unaddressed in premieres. A tricky rhythm; an interesting-but-correct pitch clash that needs to be tuned; etcetera. So, during the performance, I was oddly relaxed, and just able to enjoy the performance like a regular person.

The brand new San Jose City Hall Rotunda turned out to be a great concert venue. (I’d never heard of it. I live under a rock.) It’s basically a giant (3-4 storey?) glass dome, which looks out onto the street. It’s a little like the Today Show, with the street just sort of “happening” out there behind the orchestra. Actually, during the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, an ambulance went by, which was a drag, but also kind of cool and surreal. But the sound was good, and the atmosphere was elegant.

A couple of excerpts of the performance can be heard here. If you want to hear the whole thing, let me know.

Thanks again to Emily Ray and the Mission Chamber Orchestra. If you’re in the South Bay, you must check them out. Coming up in April they’ve got pianist Jon Nakamatsu. See their site for details.

Rehearsal Report

I don’t normally ask to attend first rehearsals of my pieces, because a) I feel I would be a distraction, and b) they’re just really hard to listen to. As much slack as you cut for it being a first rehearsal, it’s just hard to be there while they’re sorting things out for the first time.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like that moment when you hear a tutti chord that doesn’t sound quite right, and before you can figure out what the problem is, you hear the conductor say, “can I have a little more from the seconds?”, and then they play it again and it’s perfect.

It’s becoming apparent to me now that I’m not as picky as some composers. This is based on the surprised reaction when I don’t have a strong opinion about some detail of bowing or articulation. Maybe I should be more exacting. Basically, all I care about is the overall effect of the piece. I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters. I trust conductors with the nitty gritty stuff. (Someday I may learn not to, but not this month.)

Letter to Hungary receives its U.S. premiere on January 27th in the San Jose City Hall rotunda, thanks to conductor Emily Ray and the Mission Chamber Orchestra. Please consult their web site for details.

Beautiful Squirrel Merchandise

I was just deleting some comment spam, and I came across that one. Isn’t it great?

So anyway, I’ve installed a little comment-spam-preventing monkey, where you have to type in the word you see in the picture. Sorry, but it was getting out of hand.

With this I end my long blogging silence. Real posts are on the way.

Chanelling Howard Hanson?

Among several CDs I picked up on a recent Amoeba Records binge, I think I’ve stumbled across a musical ancestor. This 1989 Seattle Symphony recording of Howard Hanson‘s Symphonies 1 and 2 was sitting there staring at me from the clearance bin, so I idlely grabbed it, thinking ‘what the heck’.

Having never paid any attention to Hanson before, I listened to it for the first time with great interest. About two thirds of the way through the final movement of Symphony No. 1, I heard something that made me stop and rewind.

Keep in mind that I’ve never heard this Hanson symphony before in my life, and check this out. It’s an excerpt from my 2000 orchestra piece Misterium Tremendum.

It’s funny to me, because a review of a 2003 performance of Misterium picked on it for ripping off Sibelius, and I actually wasn’t familiar with Sibelius when I wrote the piece. I eventually got to know and love Sibelius, partly thanks to that review (which was actually quite fair and astute).

Turns out I was ripping off Hanson without realizing it. Hanson, I found out from the liner notes, was a Sibelius fan himself. What’s particularly interesting is the news that one of Hanson’s students was William Bergsma who taught my last teacher, Conrad Susa. I suppose that makes him a musical great-grandfather of sorts.

Surprising Juvenilia

I’ve just come across an old recording from my undergraduate Senior Recital, which took place in 1989. Having also just recently spent a lot of time dealing with art songs (other people’s), I was particularly interested in listening to my setting for baritone of a passage from Romeo and Juliet.

Turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s certainly not flawless, but I’m as pleased with it as I was back in the day. Really, not bad for a 20-year-old with an attention span problem.

This is taken from Act 3, Scene 3, where Romeo learns that he is to be banished from Verona:

There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.

                                        — heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her;
But Romeo may not. More validity,
More honourable state, more courtship lives
In carrion-flies than Romeo: they my seize
On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand
And steal immortal blessing from her lips.
But Romeo may not; he is banished:
Flies may do this, but I from this must fly:
They are free men, but I am banished.

There is a companion piece for soprano taken from Juliet’s famous “Come, night” speech. The two were performed together as Two Songs from Romeo and Juliet. I’m still proud of the Juliet song, but from a dramatic point of view it’s completely wrong, so I’m not as eager to crow about it here.

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Well, almost, anyway.

The driveway is covered up. Tomorrow, my studio gets a new floor, which will be nice, since the old one was slanted.