Keeping Busy

Spring quarter is off to a blisteringly intense start. So intense, that I'm just now writing about it four weeks in.

Taking too many credits for my own good, but it is hard to resist with so many attractive course offerings. The meat of the quarter is centered around Roger Reynold's analysis seminar, though Mark Dresser's improvisation ensemble class is equally demanding. I'm also tasting a bit of music cognition and computation outside the department, in addition to group composition lessons.

In Roger's class, my main topic is depiction in the John Cage Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which has a famously beautiful and baffling score. We are treating this document as a catalog of compositional methods, or species of composition, most of which entail some kind of creatively powerful ambiguity.

I'm returning to trumpet for the quarter in the improvisation ensemble, primarily to strengthen my improvisation chops on my native instrument. I've always felt more comfortable improvising on keyboard instruments, primarily because of an attachment to resonance and harmony. Furthermore, there is a powerful magnetism about learning Robert Erickson's Kryl, whose original interpreter is UCSD emeritus faculty Ed Harkins.

I'm attempting to exchange energy between my improvisation and composition efforts at the moment, with an interesting intermediary - I've been writing a bunch of software in Pd with the intent of having a palette of improvisation aids, the first of which I'm calling "mUTTERANCES" for now. George Lewis blew my mind with his machine improvisation tools in performance when he visited campus last quarter. Modeling intuitive processes is extremely revealing, and powerful, not only in what you create on the computation side, but also in what you learn about your own faculties through reflection.