xenakis piece - myomantic dreams (and other rejected ideas)
I was excited for this concert: graphic scores? Lights? Hell yeah. So I had a lot of different ideas, but the original was in fact entirely different than the one performed. The original idea was to convert a collage of West Australian flora I made into a graphic score... somehow. The problem with this is that I am not smart enough to figure out how to read that as a score concisely. I shortly scrapped it after a couple of weeks pining over it.
After getting out of that hassle, I wrote what I do best, a text score. There's something good about writing a text score where you know both the space and players, so I thought I'd take care of it. The original score was called "Cardiac Arrest in Technicolor!", which is a very cool name. Fortunately, I did research on cardiac arrests and it's just a little too heavy of a topic in a piece where colours are flashing and percussionists are having a good time. So I changed it to "Myomantic Dreams", which is about 6 rats who tell your future. I feel like Myomantic Dreams might be my TTSG for this sort of score as well, as in this piece is the last of the "segments of a score that players need to choose" type scoring method that I'll write for a while. I have an unperformed one for the saxophone ensemble, but I wrote that before this one.
So cut to performance day, and things aren't looking too good for my original plan for ol' MD. Originally, the lights were going to change colour, which would inform the percussionists on what to play. Unfortunately, due to many factors (new technology that needed to be learnt, covid-19, etc), they weren't able to make it work as originally intended. So what did I do? An hour before the show opened I wrote out a little slip of paper for the the percussionists. They couldn't change the colours except kinda dim and lighten up yellow lights spotlighted on each musician, so I had to work around that. Hence, this:
...And then it turned out great! There was also an electronic part that might have annoyed Stu (sorry Stu!) that I diffused, which was pretty cool, but not really something I plan on exploring that much. I have horrible ears, so listening carefully is hard.
(Thank you very much to Amber, Brooke and everyone else in the LX department, Laurie and the sound department, Stuart James, Lindsay Vickery the other composers, and Genevieve Wilkins and the Defying Gravity Ensemble for making the concert as good as it was!)
(Thank you very much to Amber, Brooke and everyone else in the LX department, Laurie and the sound department, Stuart James, Lindsay Vickery the other composers, and Genevieve Wilkins and the Defying Gravity Ensemble for making the concert as good as it was!)