This has been a stressful and busy month, I got sick for a good portion of it, and on top of that I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, so it’s some small miracle that I was able to get an October piece put together in time for the holiday.
Going for more of a sci-fi horror vibe this year, finally taking advantage of a neat, gritty little sound design synth called Scarbo, which my brother had gifted me sometime back. It’s certainly not my best work, given the above-mentioned constraints, but sometimes in art, you just need to pick something, push through, and finish it in order to break a slump with that little jolt of forced productivity!
I went and saw the Wicked movie last night, and yeah, it’s as well done as everyone is proclaiming it to be. I was especially impressed with how surprisingly great Ariana Grande was in her role.
(Cynthia Erivo also killed it, to be sure, but I’ve seen her go to town on “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”, and Elphaba’s vocals are more accessible than Glinda’s anyway, so I had no doubt she’d be able to handle Wicked with ease.)
I was never a mega-fan of the musical or anything, but I do think “No One Mourns the Wicked” is a Broadway all-timer – in fact, probably the biggest qualm I have with the show is that its opening number is by far its best one, and is so good in both concept and execution that it writes a check that the rest of the show simply cannot cash (sorry, “Defying Gravity” fans – that one’s never done much for me). By peaking right out of the gate, it just kind of wrecks the musical progression and leaves it nowhere to build up to.
All of that to say, the main thing I was looking forward to was seeing how that opening sequence would be handled in the film. I ungraciously assumed that it would just be toned down (or awkwardly auto-tuned) for the sake of Ariana Grande – not that I have anything against her, but most human beings are not physically capable of hitting those notes, and those who can, especially when they make a career out of singing, tend to show off that capability.
But, no, they didn’t change anything, and it turns out that Ariana Grande was, in fact, up for the task. Does she have the effortless, immaculate operatic coloratura soprano of her stage show counterpart? No. But is it fair to compare a mortal singer to Kristen Chenoweth? Also no. So even though she’s clearly pushing herself harder to get into that register, she successfully lands it, and her tone gives it an airy Disney princess vibe that isn’t unfit for the character.
Outside of her performance, I also enjoyed the more fittingly elaborate staging the number was afforded by the flexibility of the film medium. I came in a little skeptical, but it ended up being a really solid production all around.
Thus, having my expectations already satisfactorily met ~10 minutes into the movie, the rest of it could have fallen off a broomstick, but as it happens it was also very well put together, with great set and costume design, fun choreography, and enjoyable performances.
As it turns out, I do still exist, and ’tis the season to be spooky (or at least somber and moody), so in the spirit of Halloween, let’s play a bit of catch-up with a few of my semi-regular October pieces over the intervening years since my last update.
2024 – Crimson Spiral
The most recent of the bunch. A tense little harpsichord sonata that I’d roughed out a few bars for last year, and ended up returning to over the past couple weeks and finishing with atypically little turmoil.
2023 – A Path Through the Bramble
Another harpsichord piece (there’s just something classy and autumn-y about the harpsichord, you know?). This one gave me a lot more trouble, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to properly finish it, as it wasn’t quite clicking until I changed a single note by a single semitone in one chord, and then suddenly everything fell into place, and I ultimately ended up reasonably happy with it.
2022 – Susurrus
Just a solo piano piece this time. I like the sound of this felt piano in theory, but it always feels terribly difficult to equalize, and mastering has never been a strong suit of mine. I suppose I’m generally O.K. with how it turned out, though, provided it’s not played back on speakers that exacerbate the messier frequency interactions.
2020 – Tell Us How You Really Feel
I think it’s fair to say that 2020 was a pretty awful year for the world at large, so this was something of an anti-tribute to it. This piece is more of an experimental, grungy, angry, corrupted semi-mechanical cacophony of bad times (but still generally melodic, as I have a hard time committing to straight-up ambient compositions).
How about another quick piece of video game music?
I usually write NES music with a tracker, which is more like programming an audio chip with a series of sound instructions than it is composing in a traditional sense. This time, however, I wanted to try out Matt Montag’s NES VST, which is a plugin that allows one to recreate 8-bit Nintendo tunes with a standard notation sequencer. The streamlined workflow meant I could throw something like this this together in about an hour.
As such, enjoy (or hate (or be utterly indifferent to)) a jaunty little level loop.
What’s this? More music? The only creative thing I can complete lately!?
I encountered a thread on Twitter a couple weeks back of people posting their favorite (invariably science fiction) ’80s cartoon opening themes, which left me with the urge to write something along those lines.
As a side note, if you crave an exercise in madness, try coming up with a title consisting of “Star” followed by a cool/short/punchy word that isn’t already the name of some existing sci-fi show, movie, book, game, or what have you.
In lieu of sufficient progress on certain matters to make a worthwhile announcement quite yet, here is…yet more music.
Eh? Ehhhhh???
This one’s just a short bangy harpsichord piece I did while feeling glum. What better than baroque tones to express feeling bad, but, like, in a classy way? As always, SoundCloud compression trashes harpsichord, but feel free to download if so inclined.
And here’s an experimental synth piece I did with a neat little waveform shaper called Glass Viper. I constructed all of the sounds in it just by manually drawing in and layering small audio waveforms (which it will frequency-modulate to pitch-map), and only really scratched the surface of what this synthesizer is capable of.
Good question! Short answer…doing big things. But more on that later.
For now – new music!
I had the urge to write something classical, which I realized I hadn’t done in some time, so I threw together my take on a baroque harpsichord toccata (well, maybe not “threw together”; I actually spent a lot more time on it than I meant to). As usual, SoundCloud’s streaming compression crumples harpsichord dynamics, but alas. Feel free to download if you’d like a giant FLAC file.
Programming audio for the NES is fun, so when I came across an emulator for the S-SMP (the SNES sound processor), I had to take a stab at Super Nintendo music as well.
I’m not very good at action/battle music. So, of course, I wrote an RPG battle theme.
Naturally, I went for something in the Final Fantasy vein. I probably could have done some further sample-rate/bit-depth reduction to make it sound more like it was coming from a real SNES DSP (the percussion’s a bit too crisp in particular), but this seemed to be an acceptable balance that hopefully still captures its distinct feel.
Got a neat little inverse-colored super-portable miniature MIDI keyboard to use with my laptop on a Labor Day sale, so I of course had to throw something together with it
Another go at an ’80s-noir synth vibe (but with a koto for some reason). Had a heck of a time getting it to sound O.K. streaming – pure sine waves amid a lot of ambiance is really hard to compress, apparently. Ended up uploading FLAC instead of MP3 this time, which helped a bit, but this piece seems a lot more dependent on physical speaker properties than most.
Writin' Fish 