Maius Intra Qua Extra

I did say a little while ago that I wanted to post more frequently. I'm not really succeeding at that, so here's a new attempt.



This past month's busy-ness was actually justified and not just me sitting around, doing nothing. Dan, the teacher of the jazz class that I'm taking, which he calls Small Band, signed up whoever wanted to participate to play at a local holiday festival. He intended it to be an hour's worth of chamber pieces, so duets and trios of holiday music. It ended up being about ten people, from both Small Band and Dan's larger band group, the OMT, which is the marching band that I used to perform with a number of years ago.

(Segue: The OMT used to have my friend Tim [who I've talked about many times] as the conductor. When Tim retired from it, there was a bunch of political drama around finding a new conductor for the band, part of which was them pressuring me to take over running the group (not conducting, but doing the business work), which is why I left the band. That was before Dan signed on. I might have written this up in my blog back then; don't remember.)

While we were talking with each other about what songs we wanted to do and with which instruments and people, Laurie, Dan's wife, and I agreed to do a flute/clarinet duo of Greensleeves. I went looking for arrangements and couldn't find any that I liked (they were all very simple melody/harmony arrangements), so... I did it myself. I wrote my own arrangement of Greensleeves

What does that mean? It basically means writing the song as I wanted it to sound, and putting it down on paper. What I wanted was playing the song once through with flute melody and clarinet harmony, and then a second time with clarinet melody with the flute playing some Celtic-sounding stuff in the background. I have never done anything like this before, so I just had to muddle through.

I started with getting the melody and chords off the Internet, then used the chords to figure out what the harmony should be. That was the easy part. Then I sat and sung to myself what "Celtic-sounding stuff" would sound like, and once I that in mind, I had to write it down, which I found to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. Having played my instrument for a while, I had found that while I'm trying to improvise something in jazz, I have some intuition as to what the next note should be and my fingers go there automatically. But sitting there going, "Okay, this note is C, so what should the next note be?" That's baffling. Dan's trying to teach us how to recognize the next note by interval ("This sounds like a fourth, and a fourth up from C is F, so it's an F.") but no, I can't do that.

Anyway... This took me days to do, but it was so much fun. I used Musescore for writing the music, and it, like all the other music-writing programs, will play what you've written so you can hear what it sounds like. And let me tell you, it is amazing to hear what you've written. It's like, "That's mine. I did that." (I think that's what Donna said when telling Sylvia about how proud she is of Rose. No, I haven't had kids and can't say it's the same, but I think, in a way, it is.)

And on top of that, Laurie loved it! We hadn't talked about what we'd wanted to our Greensleeves to sound like, but it turned out, it was what she'd imagined, too, adding the Celtic feel to the song.

Then Dan suggested that we perform it not only at the holiday festival, but also at the big gig that the OMT was doing at the local holiday market. With that, I wanted to include another clarinet, so I rewrote the arrangement and added more interesting stuff for the clarinets to do.

However, I felt that it would be a waste of time for me to show up to the OMT performance for only one song, so I joined the OMT for the one concert, and that was a lot of fun. Dan has changed the OMT to match his style: under Tim, it was a "let's just get together and play some music" band, but Dan envisions it as a teaching and performing band, so his rehearsals are instructive. Dan has lost some of the older players from the band because they don't like the new style, but he's replaced them with a lot of new blood, which is actually good - the band under Tim had been dwindling because most of the musicians were old and either retired from music due to health issues or passed away. Anywway... I really like actually getting to learn again and love Dan's style, but I still don't think I should join the OMT again, just because I don't want to devote time to another band. (Also, Dan loves cool jazz and always includes some cool jazz pieces, but I've found that I'm really not fond of cool jazz. Trad jazz is much more fun.)

One other thing that I loved about playing with the OMT this time - we played some modern pieces! Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers! Which yes, I realize Smells Like Teen Spirit is not "modern", but I remember observing at one point that Tim never had us play anything that was younger than fifty years.

Long story short... I spent a large chunk of this past month writing and arranging music and rehearsing and playing with various bands, and it was awesome! I didn't manage to get much real life work done, but this was what my taking extended time off from work was supposed to be about, getting to pursue some creative and hobby things for a while. So, I guess that's been a success, at least in November.