Legacy

Gonzaga coach Mark Few was recently asked if his team's trip to the Final Four cements his legacy, and "gets the monkey off his back".  I love his response, in an article at espn

"I'm schlepping along right now, like, vastly far behind my father, who is 54 years a Presbyterian minister, man," Few said. "He's saved thousands of souls. He's helped hundreds and thousands of people through all their tough times, you know? And that's kind of the legacy that I'm looking at. I've got a long ways to go to get to first base living up to that guy's standard. He's a titan of a man, talking about the impact he's had on people.

A scarcity of time

Heard something on NPR about scarcity and impulse control.

 MULLAINATHAN: The same person, when they're poor, should have very different cognitive capacity than when they're rich. So how would we test that? Well, unfortunately, we don't have the kind of money to go around making poor people rich, but sugarcane farmers actually create a natural experiment for us.

VEDANTAM: That's right - sugarcane farmers in India. These farmers, it turns out, are paid only once a year, right after the harvest.

MULLAINATHAN: The month after they get that income, they're pretty rich. But like anybody who gets a huge windfall all at once, the money gets spent a little too fast. And so by the end of the harvest cycle, they're relatively poor. So now we have the same person a month before harvest poor and a month after harvest well-off.

VEDANTAM: Sendhil and Eldar tested the farmers on their long-term thinking when they had no money and when they had plenty of money. The results were stunning.

MULLAINATHAN: We found a huge difference. So we found that post-harvest, when they're well-off, they have much more impulse control.

More at npr

I find I have this problem, but I don't have a scarcity of money necessarily.  I have a scarcity of time.

George Winston Reflection - Time Signature Change

Couple of things. I love the recording. Also the change in meter in the middle of the song.  It switches time signature from 4/4 to 3/4 in the middle, with a tempo change

From 0:38 to 0:57


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLTZ_HY80ow

George Winston and James Booker

I wore out my George Winston plays Vince Guaraldi CD in high school, and I always liked the rhythm pattern in "Peppermint Patti". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjflBbGqFts

I was listening to James Booker's "Junco Partner" today, and found some of the same rhythms and bass patterns.  (They start about a minute into the piece)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BER0QpV7O8

James Booker Jazz Piano

I switched to the Stephen Flaherty channel on Pandora today.  He co-wrote "Once Upon a December" with David Newman, so it seemed appropriate.  David Newman's channel was mostly film scores, 20th century piano, and classical Russian pieces by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovitch.

Stephen Flaherty's Pandora channel is '70s era New Orleans Blues piano and George Winston, which has been a hoot.  My favorite has been James Booker.  Here's his recording of St. James Infirmary, a classic blues tune.  I love the chromatic stuff he adds into the melody line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3IL8q8ahWI

On the subject of James Booker, here's his Blues Minuet.  I love this.  Last week, I posted some classical pieces by Kasputin that had Jazz influence.  This is a blues piece with classical influence.  It's got some fun counterpoint going on.  I don't hear that much in jazz, and I really enjoy it. The Blues minuet is the first three or four minutes of this piece. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jI5G2T9r_c

Russian Waltzes from Khatchaturian and Shostakovich

 Heard these two Russian waltzes today.  They're pretty similar in style, strong timpani, minor key, and tempo.  The Shostakovitch starts out with saxophones, which is pretty interesting.  Also, the crowd sings along in this recording, which is pretty fun.

Khatchaturian Masquerada Waltz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JxLgf3wLM

Shostakovich Suite for Jazz Orchestra, No 2, Waltz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vauo4o-ExoY

Kasputin preludes in a jazz style

Ran across Nikolai Kapustin music on Pandora today.  He's a classical composer who composes a weird mix of 20th century and jazz. 

Kasputin preludes in a jazz style op. 53 no 17 sounds like 30's era stride piano.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14SWYVY09so


Toccatina Op. 36 sounds like someone merged George Winston with Hammie from "Over the Hedge"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b--1FHTgAQs

Concert Etude Op. 40 starts out sounding 20th century and keeps getting more jazz like.  Pretty fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=116QHk9jNGI

Cluster chord in the Hobbit Soundtrack

In the Hobbit : An Unexpected journey - Moon Runes there is a cool cluster chord in the French Horns at around :47 to :57

Howard shore uses these cluster chords a lot in his Lord of the Rings, to build tension.  Here's some more examples, from the fourth track, Axe or Sword

At 2:37 - 2:56 : Interesting building dissonance


3:37 - 3:45 : There it is again, in the horns instead of the strings


4:04 - 4:18 : Again, but strings and horns

Daily Journaling

NNU recently started stocking daily planning pads from Bloom Planners.  I've got the pad on my desk at work, and I've been trying to fill it out every morning, as a way of jump starting my brain.

I'm using the "other to-do's" section to build a daily bullet journal.  It's a task management technique I read about on lifehacker.  I tried it about a year ago, and couldn't keep up with it, because it has a lot of indexing requirements that I couldn't track very well.  I'm currently just using the daily journaling piece, where you list out tasks, and either complete them, discard them, or move them to the next day.  I mark each task with it's ticket number in SherpaDesk, so the ticketing system handle all the indexing for me.

The left side of the pad has two sections, that I've repurposed.  To use some ideas from Donald Miller's daily productivity schedule. I tried using the Donald Miller daily schedule for a couple of months several years ago, but my work is more task based than project based, and it didn't work for me.  I really liked the daily reflection in Donald Miller's method, so "To Buy" becomes "Things I would do if I could live this day over again".  "Things I'm grateful for" becomes "Things I get to look forward to".

Anyway, that's what I'm doing now, and it's been working for a week.  Typically, I get tired of these things after a month or two.  We'll see what happens, I guess.

A Pixar storytelling class

I just got an email from Khan Acadamy about a new pixar storytelling class, where you can "learn from the creative minds behind movies like Toy Story, Inside Out, and Up to unlock your own storytelling superpowers."  This sounds awesome!

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar/storytelling

Cataloging music

I was in a life coaching session a couple weeks ago with Errol Carrim, and he said that some things we do are energy positive (we gain energy doing them), and somethings are energy negative (we lose energy doing them).  I'd never thought about this

I've been writing a lot of music over the past year, but I don't get a lot of it past the "sketching idea" phase.  I gain energy by coming up with ideas and working with them, and it becomes work when I try to finish the project. 

I'd been spending time cataloging music instead of writing it, and that's a negative energy project.  I come away from it feeling drained.  I hadn't written any music at all.  Errol suggested that I balance work that drains energy with some work that gathers it.  I've tried that, and I'm feeling a lot less exhausted and drained.  Yipee!  I'm also applying the idea to my computer programming work, and it's helping there too.

It's helpful to realize that feeling exhausted and drained is not the same as being lazy

Two notes on music composition

First Note :

I had my music composition lesson with Steve Kuykendall yesterday, and he brought up a good point about tempo.  I'm writing a psalm setting of Psalm 69, and there's alternating slow and fast sections.  The fast sections were almost too fast to be understood.  I couldn't say the lyrics fast enough.  But if I slowed the song down, then the slow section would be too slow.

He pointed out that I could slow down the fast section without slowing down the whole piece.  Composers do that all the time.  It never occurred to me to do that.  Almost all the modern music I'm listening has a constant beat to it, probably because most music is composed on computers and looped and layered, and that doesn't work at all if the tempo isn't maniacally consistent.

I learned about that while trying to record tracks in the Digital Music / Technology class I took last fall.

If I change the tempo in the piece, it will solve a musical problem I'm having, and also make the music stand out and sound different.  Interesting.

Second Note :

Youtube threw up an ad about Hans Zimmer's online master class while I was searching for Barber music.  In the ad, he says that music is like a story.  There's a call and response.  I hadn't thought about it that way before.  Thinking in terms of call and response might add more natural counterpoint to the pieces I'm working on.  I'm going to have to give it a try.

Also, I might have to take the class. 

Petrushka and Barber

I've been listening to Pandora stations while I code, and made a "David Newman" channel.  He wrote "Once Upon a December" from Anastasia, which came up when I was listening to the "La La Land" channel.  

The "David Newman" channel is an odd mix of film scores and 20th century piano music.  The channel just played "Petrushka", a piece for piano solo by Igor Stravinsky.  I didn't know Igor Stravinsky wrote any piano music, and I thought it was pretty interesting.  It's very difficult, and fairly long, so I would never be able to actually play it, but I wanted to make note of it here, so I can come back later if I want.

Here's a link to the song on youtube.



I also ran into some piano music by Samuel Barber.  I've only known him by his "Adagio For Strings", but he's got some interesting piano stuff, including these three sketches.  Each one is fairly simple, and about a minute long.  A lot more like something I would play, I think.

All three have interesting countermelodies in them.  Movement 1 is a waltz; Movement 2 is a slow waltz with some interesting chord progressions; Movement 3 sounds like something by chopin.

Movement 1; Movement 2; Movement 3