On Music

[reldnahkram]

The hardest part of composing is not coming up with ideas. That's easy. The hard part is making those ideas go somewhere. For two weeks now, I've had what I thought were pretty cool pieces to show Jerry (admitedly, first drafts), but both ultimately had the same kind of flaw. They didn't go anywhere, and so ultimately would bore the listener. The first, for clarinet, stuck doggedly to the same two melodic motifs and just repeated itself again and again. The second, for bassoon (are there any bassoon players on campus?) had a neat motivic idea (major seventh), but I didn't use it enough. Hopefully I'll be able to sit down over break and work both of them into shape. Of course, the worry there is that by taking actual time to prepare pieces for Jerry, my 'do it all Tuesday night before Wednesday's meeting' approach will be unmasked and I'll have to put more time in to composition during the rest of the week. Admittedly, this isn't a bad thing, as it will make things better, but ack, more time!

Apparently, my piano playing is also improving. I'm doing a decent job at handling the pieces Tony gets me, I probably wouldn't have been able to do this (or think I could do this) as a froshling. I'd qualify this as a good thing.

WinAMP 5 rocks. I've got it on always on top, 20% transparent, with opaque on hover. Basically, it sits out of the way, barely visible, unless I want it, in which case my mouse goes to it and it pops into clear view. But I really won't need to do that, since my laptop media buttons and stereo remote control are both able to control WinAMP. Go me!

I've been playing entirely too much bridge this semester, both on the computer and with real people. And I say this like it's a bad thing...

Rode the train in to Penn this morning with ccommack. Really should meet him for lunch one day in the city.

Comments

[irilyth]

I used to have things arranged so that my xmms window didn't overlap with anything else, but since changing window managers, one negative side effect is that this is no longer true... I really like the transparency idea! Do you know offhand if this is an intrinsic WinAmp thing (in which case xmms doesn't seem to do it, since I don't see it as an option), or a skin thing (in which case I could just download the appropriate skin)?

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

It's a WinXP (and I think Win2K) thing, but it's up to the individual programs to provide the functionality. I don't think I can make any window I want transparent. That being said, WinAMP is the only thing I've made transparent - I haven't found it useful to make Trillian (AIM) transparent - either the buddy list or individual message windows.

[god-of-belac.livejournal.com]

We should play Bridge on Yahoo sometime. I'm Sir_Astel_Dizaria.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I've been playing entirely too much bridge this semester, both on the computer and with real people. And I say this like it's a bad thing...

As long as it's not affecting your grades too much -- in the fifties, my dad knew several people whom bridge did that to. :-)

[reldnahkram.livejournal.com]

Meh...there's been much less board gaming this year than last - it's much better for all involved to play a rubber at PPPP than to play 2-3 hours of board games.