The World's Best Surprise Bag

This is my progress report on my piece The World’s Best Surprise Bag.  I am very excited about this composition.

            The first question that I always get about this piece is “What’s with the title?”  One day on my way up to Saddleback to do some snowboarding I stopped at Jack’s Trading Post for some food.  While waiting in line I saw this delightfully eye catching package…a surprise bag, which was only about a dollar.  Immediately I knew that I must write a song about this ridiculous product.  See Picture 1.

            When I opened it up I found out that it truly was the GREATEST surprise bag ever!!, I guess…Inside it held a lollipop, a photocopied coloring book, one sticker, a foam airplane, gum, and a photocopied piece of paper with a crossword on one side and Mr. Surprise’s story on the other.  Let me tell you Mr. Surprise’s story:

            “When I was just a little baggie, I lived in the cupboard.  Every day, a kind old woman would give me a yummy piece of candy and a treasured toy.  Before long I grew to become a big bag filled with surprises.

            One day the old woman opened the cupboard door, carefully brought me down from the shelf, and asked a little boy to reach into my bag.  You should have seen the wonderful smile on his face when he pulled out his surprises.

            From that moment on I knew I had to leave my cupboard and surprise children all over the world.  So I packed my bags with candy and toys, gave the kind old woman a peppermint kiss, and began my adventure.  Now, as my travels take me to far away places, I find great candy and toys and send them home to Surprise Bag Land, where they go into my surprise bags for you to enjoy.”

            So now you can see why I am so excited about this piece.

            At the time that I purchased this bag (winter 2005-’06) I was in a band called The Pond Duck Trio.  We had bass, drums, and guitar.  Initially I had planned to do this piece with that group.  Unfortunately in 2006 we decided to learn all of The Beatles’ Abbey Road instead, so that took up the majority of our time (I am just joking about it being unfortunate, learning Abbey Road was one of the greatest things I’ve ever done).  The World’s Best Surprise Bag ended up on the back burner.  When I pulled it out the second time I decided to re think the instrumentation.  I have always been a sucker for a good piano trio, especially those by Schubert and Beethoven.  I decided that a piano trio would be a great lineup for this piece.  Of course this piece would need lyrics though, so I decided to add two voices to the mix.  One of these vocalists will also play some simple percussion in the piece, consisting of a single cymbal and wind chimes.

            See Picture 2 for my initial mock up of the piece.  I didn’t know the order of all of the sections at first, and sometimes I would stick in new parts in between sections I had already written.  So as I wrote the sections, I cut them up and re pasted them onto a new piece of paper in the order that I wanted them.  Of course this is a very rough mock up though.

            The next step I took was to neaten it up, see Picture 3.  Since I didn’t have any music notation software on my computer, but I did have Adobe Illustrator, I decided to create my own sort of notation software within Illustrator.  I created a grid that would be accurate down to a sixteenth note, and then made it so that all shapes in Illustrator would snap to the grid.  I made it so that this grid would not print too, but only be visible when I was working in the program.  This was a very effective method of creating lead sheet type scores.  In this first draft using this method I only had slashes in most bars, acting as placeholders.  There is very little in the way of distinct rhythms or chord voicings.

            In the third draft, Picture 4, I decided to get more specific with rhythms and voicings.  I created a grand staff for this.  I created all of my note heads, stems, beams, ledger lines, flags, etc., from scratch in Adobe Illustrator.  Then I copied and pasted those items as needed.  This allowed me to have total control over the look of the score, much like writing sheet music by hand.  

Here is the latest draft I have been working on, Picture 5.  This I did in the program Sibelius.  Sibelius is music notation software, and is the industry standard.  It is essentially the Microsoft Word of sheet music.  It is an extremely powerful program, sometimes too powerful.  I have only been using this program for a couple months, and I am getting much faster at using this program, but at first it was very slow going.  In fact it took me an hour and a half just to enter the seventeen bars of the tenor line.

            Sibelius has many great features that help me along the way.  For instance if I try to put a note in that is too high or low for the range of the viola, cello, soprano, or tenor it will shade that note red in order to warn me.  If I try to enter a piano chord that would be impossible for an average pianist to stretch their hands into, it will shade that chord red.  It also has a feature called “flexi-time” input where it will play a metronome, and I can use a MIDI piano to play the notes directly into the program.  When I’m all done it will also extract the individual parts for each performer, and print them out individually.

            A feature that I particularly like is that Sibelius will play back the audio of my piece.  Granted it sounds really cheesy (think old school Nintendo sounds, but a little better), but it helps because if I make a mistake that I am neglecting to visually notice, I can check my work and see if I notice it aurally.  The playback also understands all standard markings, so that if I add a slur, a staccato, an accent, a dynamic marking, an ornament, a special bowing, etc, I will hear that reflected in the audio.

            So that is my process thus far regarding the notation.  Now I would like to talk about the vision of my piece.

            When composing the first thing I always think of is the overall vision.  This is not something that I can convey easily in words though, it is essentially what I want to get out of my imagination and into the air.  Without the vision for the composition, there is no composition, so that is why I must think of this first.

            The second thing I think about is the performer’s role.  Without performers to perform the composition, then there is a composition, but no one can hear it.  I must consider many things for the performers.  For instance I cannot write a double stop (a double stop is when a string performer plays two notes simultaneously) that would require the cellist to stretch his or her index finger and pinky a distance of twelve inches.  Well unless I could convince Yao Ming to play cello in my piece.  I also have to consider how enjoyable it is for the performers.  If their part only plays for a very small duration of the piece, they will be very bored during the rest of the piece.  I also have to consider the skill level of the performers.  Fortunately the potential performers I have lined up for this piece are very skilled, and could probably play anything I threw at them.  But I am considering that I also want to have this piece performed in the future, and I may not have that luxury then.

            My third and final consideration is the audience.  There will likely be composers and performers in the audience.  So I want the piece to be interesting to them, at multiple levels.  I want to challenge them to think when they are listening.  But there will also be people who don’t know anything at all about music.  So the piece has to be accessible to them.  It can’t be so complicated that it only appeals to the musicians in the audience, and sounds like total dissonance and chaos to the non-musicians.

                        In the compositional process I will be applying knowledge I have gained from Piano 1, 2, and 3, Music Theory 1, 2, and 3, Orchestration, and Cello lessons.  Although it may sound not so creative, a technique I am going to use for my own practice is to take my music theory book and go through it and try to use as many of the techniques described in it as possible.  For instance I will use secondary functions, non-chord tones, sequences, typical harmonic progression, common-chord modulation, common-tone modulation, direct modulation, mode mixture, Neapolitan chords, augmented sixth chords, enharmonic modulation, and many more techniques that I have in my music composition toolbox.

            The performers for this piece are going to be Phil Carlsen on cello, Amy LeBlanc on viola, Dan Woodward singing tenor, either Lily Funahashi or Steve Pane on piano, and the soprano is to be announced.

            I will be creating a giant four foot by seven foot Surprise Bag for the performance.  This summer I am taking 2D design, and I will use that knowledge to create the design for my own rendition of a surprise bag.  I am going to make a giant lollipop, a giant foam airplane, a giant sticker, and a giant piece of gum for this.

Art's Night

What an exciting Michael D. Wilson Art's Night this year.  It's amazing to think that a whole year has passed since the first Art's Night.  It seems like yesterday.

This year's event went off without a hitch.  As far as I could tell there were no technical difficulties or anything of that nature.  I don't think it was as well attended as last year's event, but that is okay.  We'll have to think about what we can do differently for next year to change that.

The improv concert at noon was great.  When I showed up and we tried out the large group playing, I had some real reservations.  I really thought it did not sound good.  When it comes to volume levels I can get really worked up.  Just like all music it takes a lot of practice to learn how to have good levels in a live concert, especially without a sound person.  The Pond Duck Trio had a lot of experience with this playing a lot of shows that had either no sound person, or someone who could care less about the levels and did a terrible job.  So we got really good at having really good levels between ourselves on stage, then all the sound person would have to do is turn the all of the sliders to about the same level.  With such a large group at the improv class we did not all have this experience, not to mention that we had a little larger group than a trio.  The idea to have Ben be a conductor worked fabulously though.  I think that the version we did at the actual performance was the best of all of our trials.

The Car Afterlife piece went really well too, especially the second version.  The piece has a lot of aspects of improv, especially for the conductors.  Some parts of the composition called for the conductors to approximate the tempo of their flag waves for instance.  Leaving things to chance in a composition can be a good thing.  Of course it is impossible to write a musical composition that accounts for everything, and to realize that as a composer is important.  Some composers try to write out every dynamic, even specifying exactly what decibels things should be.  I think this is a little pretentious, and can in fact take away the "feeling" from the piece.

The marching drum group that I wrote and directed went very well.  I had a series of eight two-bar drum patterns, with hand signals to conduct them.  Pattern number five was simply "free improvise" and that was what we spent the most time on.  Without a ton of rehearsal time we were getting lost a little bit, but that was good and actually what I had hoped for.  The beauty of percussion is that it can be non-pitched, so harmonic dissonance is impossible.  The most important thing was that we all kept tempo together, which we did.  I was happy with the participation of people who weren't in the core group, and were trying out the various percussion instruments that Margaret Wescott lent us.

The event in Nordica was a lot of fun too.  I was very impressed with my fellow composition majors Seth Fogg and Josh Case.  Their trios sounded excellent.  The next day Lily Funahashi had an interesting point that the three of us have very different compositional styles.  I like thinking about what we do the same and what we do differently.  I think that Seth is definitely further on the melodic side of things than Josh.  I know that I tend to stick to more melodic techniques, specifically diatonic melodies, but I'm not sure if I do that more so or less than Seth.

The solo guitar improvisation was very interesting too.  It takes a lot of courage to get up in front of a crowd to perform a solo piece, especially one that is improvised on the spot.  I would be afraid that I would have a brain cramp.  He let himself go though, which I think is exactly the best thing that one can do in improv.  Rather than thinking consciously about the conunterpoint he just let the notes come to him.

The final piece of Guitar Trio that Meg Dzyak brought to us from New York went very well.  I was happy to play drums, I always love to do so.  I don't consider myself an especially great drummer, but I think I held my own.  When I mess up with drums it is always when I try to do some sort of fill that is just too fast.  Since western music has so much to do with even numbers, I have come to the conclusion that I mess up fills when I try to double my speed.  For instance quarter notes and eighth notes are always fine.  Triplets and sextuplets are always fine.  When I then try to double again to sixteenth notes, it is usually fine, unless it is especially syncopated or I try to use a combination of drums that causes my hands to stumble over each other.  When I go to thirty-second notes I often get in trouble.  I think what happens is sometimes I try to fit in thirty-one or thirty-three notes into a bar, and then I get lost.  In the moment I never know if I am right or if I messed up.  

I remember in one rehearsal of Guitar Trio trying thirty-second notes, and then thinking I might have messed up.  I looked at Phil Carlsen to see what he thought, but I had no idea how to read his face.  Then if I did mess up, all of us would have to come to consensus on whether to go with the mistake or ignore me and keep the correct beat.  All of this without talking.  And all of this happening within an instant.  I still don't know what happened.