Thoughts about nanowrimo

I've got exactly 23 hours and 50 minutes until NaNoWriMo starts. Now I know I was under the influence of muscle relaxants (they hit me like a ton of bricks--so do antihistamines and dramamine¹, which I guess is an antihistamine. And we won't get into the really messed up dreams I get off Claritin), and I have no obligation to actually do it. But I've still got absolutely no idea what I'm going to write about.

I'm not overly concerned about the time of it--I've been in college for awhile, and I can write five-page papers (essentially what this is) quickly, not that they'd be any good, though². So I guess I'll give it the old college try (pardon the pun), and see how it goes. If it gets to be too much, I can always ditch it in favor of other things.
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¹ Hey, it works! I'm not being profusely seasick, if I'm dead to the world, asleep.
² The goodness of the final work, I gather, isn't the point.

Scattered before-bed thoughts

So a few years ago, I messed up my back lifting a printer. Every once and awhile (fortunately less and less often) it tweaks out on me. The other night it was being a nuisance, so I took my muscle relaxant and settled down to my evening blog surf. In what seemed like a good idea at the time, I signed up for NaNoWriMo. Now, I know I'm under no obligation to actually do it, and with a dissertation (albeit musical), I probably shouldn't, unless I can make the two relate. But...

...I could do crossover Doctor Who/Battlestar Galactica fanfic. (OK, no I couldn't...think of the children...to illustrate how those muscle relaxants interact with me, I did seriously entertain this idea when I signed up.)

...Or it might be a good way to get my book on video game soundtracks done. One of my goals is to write a book on the aesthetics of music in video games. It's a side research interest--video games fascinate me, especially the way all levels work together--but I've no interest in ever composing music for games. I don't play nicely with others. Corporate culture makes me homicidal. But I've been doing research for the stupid thing over the past so many years. I may as well write it up finally.

...Or I could do something creative. Blogging aside, I so rarely have time to write for the sake of writing anymore. Everything I write is to be evaluated in some form, and it might be kind of fun to write something I intend for nobody to read. (Some thoughts involve a commentary on my dissertation--which would take longer than a month to do--or something involving the liturgy of the hours.)

So I don't know what I'm going to do, if I do anything at all. Suggestions are welcome, and I've got 5 days to figure it out.

New Music and complexity

I'm far from a "complex" composer. I know what I like, I know the sound I'm trying to get, and if I'm lucky, what I wanted actually comes out. I have my bag of tricks--from Balinese music, serial music, jazz, medieval and renaissance polyphony, chant melodic development, and even a few things I picked up from Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. If you buy me a beer or a bubble tea, odds are I'll tell you about a few of them in any given piece.

This article over at New Music Box has got me thinking, and not in a good way. It seems like every bit of my life lately has been taken over by dichotomies--religion, politics, gaming, now music--and the polarization resulting from them feels like it's tearing life apart some days. In the article and in the comments, there's a disparaging attitude--nothing new, I know--towards "academic" composers and critical theorists. I'd like to know where he's listening to such people who write bad music and theorize about it, because those I know who do both write really beautiful music. Odds are you wouldn't hear them on a high-profile concert, but if you know where to look, you're in for a real treat.

I'm sure a lot of bad music gets written in academe. I'm sure a lot of bad music also gets written outside of it. There's also a lot of good music written in both places, which gets ignored by snark such as that post.

Huzzah! Financial aid fixed! No explanation given, no apologies, but I'm not complaining. Thanks for all the well-wishes and prayers. They meant a lot, even though I was spaz girl. Needless to say I'm still looking into grants, and I'm no longer checking my school email over the weekends. (Y'all who know me know how to get ahold of me, anyway.)

Stress for Art

From Kelly, over at Academia as an Extreme Sport: "Give me your STRESS for my ART." Maybe there's hope for humanity, after all...

Still here

Thanks for all the prayers and well-wishes...I'm still here. I spoke with someone in the financial aid office this morning, and he had no information beyond the fact that it's "under review" and I'll be contacted "at the end of the week" about it.

Needless to say I'm also checking into dissertation grants and the like. Even if this works out, I don't want to have to rely on them and the federal government. (honestly I can't go through this every quarter, like it's shaping up to be. Then again every time in the past I've said "I can't do X," somehow the strength is there.) Ironically on the "Daily Breakfast" podcast, there was a quote from someone discussing creativity, and how it either needs an extremely relaxed state, or an extremely agitated one. Maybe this is what I need to get the code finished...(OK, I'm trying to put a positive spin on things.)

So if anyone hears of a particularly interesting grant for Catholic gamer-geek composers, let me know.

If you're the praying type, I could use them about now. I got dumped by financial aid yet again, and they let me know at 11:30 tonight. So of course I can't do anything about it now until they open up on Monday. Apologies for not confining my whines to my livejournal, like i normally do.

Procrastination from Code-Slinging

But first, an update of the dissertation meter:

300 / 4,500 (6.7%)

I'm getting tired of the current set of functions I use to make music, so I switched to a set of functions (originally coded by my chair) that interface with csound, a powerful but horrible-to-code (an exercise in self-mortification) program for music composition on the computer. Using his code is an oddly intimate thing--there are some functions which fit how I think and program intuitively, making me confront the fact that perhaps we aren't too different, after all.

When I was last on a retreat, one of the other guests made the comment that things made with computers don't have a soul. At the time, it was one of those comments that hurt, and you don't quite know what to say in response out of politeness and not wanting to make trouble. (I think I wandered off to the chapel, instead.) But it's a common complaint I hear about computer music.

While there are people who are into it for the technology, and seem to only consider the shiny thing in front of them, for me computer music is more intimate and exposed than instrumental music ever was. In instrumental music, you've got musicians between you and the audience. It's not a bad thing, and I love the communion that happens when an ensemble just "gets" your piece. But with computer music, there's nobody to hide behind, not even the technology people try to use as a shield.

Lately I've been listening off and on--I find it hard to listen to music when I'm trying to write it--to some of the computer music from the 1960's. We're talking early stuff written on computers that could only dream of the processing speed of my video card. People on my committee speak of "borrowing" CPU time from big mainframes, only to get a few seconds back the next morning. Yet what they managed to do with so little was highly musical. Listening to those pieces is like watching a concert soloist play--you start to think it's something so easy anyone could do it. That's the sign of a great musician--you don't hear the technicalities, but the stuff inside of it. It's also the epitome of taoist thought, that something is so full of effort it becomes effortless.

Eh, I'm nowhere near there yet. I gripe and moan about how slow my computer--a 1.2 ghz athlon thunderbird--is, yet I can compile a stereo piece in less than an hour. It's humbling to think that my teachers needed days.

And as a bit of a sleepy non sequitur, I put a sitemeter up. It's been interesting seeing where everyone is from.