It is the holiday season, and while I am a bit of a grinch and refuse to get into “the spirit” throughout, I do like to take the time off to do multitudinous things. This holiday I’m assembling my grad piece–that work which is simultaneously a song cycle and an album–hanging out with my family (including my mom’s family down in Maryland, hooray!), putting together my application to Bang on a Can, and hopefully reading a few books before I start my full-time job and full-time school in the new year.

I’ve been thinking about my writing style. It has changed a lot this year! I keep incorporating bits of things that I find in other people’s writing–Ryan North’s enthusiasm and punctuation (!) and ALL CAPS (because things are EXCITING, yo!), Joey Comeau’s vivid images, Said the Gramophone’s way of describing something in experiences rather than in adjectives so you know exactly what the music they talk about feels like, sounds like, tastes like. This thing where we Capitalize The Important Words so that it makes them seem pompous and sassy simultaneously (bet you can guess where); “oh yes” is a Kate Beaton quirk, I have been making an actual effort to not do sidebar information or link to random things with random words…I feel like I should start getting my own style eventually, but maybe it is okay to just imitate for now? Dabble, you know. One thing that I do that is all mine is use a minimum of contractions–I tried to give them up for Lent last year, and while it did not work entirely (it’s HARD, try it), it has left me with this dearth of apostrophes in my vocabulary. OH WELL.

People recently have been asking me to try to define my composing style, and it is so hard! Much like my writing, I dabble dabble dabble. I guess my trios are Modernist and Minimalist, I guess my tuba suite is neo-classical (all quartal harmonies and images)…I don’t know! It is weird, this figuring-out what I do, figuring out what I like.

The one trend I think is prevalent across a lot of my work–literary and musical–is a penchant for pointing out how imperfect things can be beautiful. Like this poem:

Spectacle

The first day you wear glasses
you feel short and ugly,
you get a headache;
you see
all the things you missed before:
patterns in hubcaps,
bricks in walls,
leaves on trees.

I submitted this poem as part of my Manuscript for the poetry class I was in last term. Do you see what I mean? Getting glasses is harsh because it hurts your eyes and makes you look like a loser, but you can see detail and that makes it worthwhile. Who knew hubcaps and bricks and leaves could be so attractive? I don’t know if it comes across in the music that I write, but it does appear in my approach to performances–the things that happen that are unwritten make it, separate each performance from each other as a different work of art. At the premiere of a piece by Nancy Tam at the last NUMUS concert (for which I have been meaning to write a review, hurgh), a motorcycle revved by the church just as the last chord was fading away. It couldn’t have been scripted, that sound, but it was perfect. I like the mistakes, guys, I like imperfection. That’s what makes us human, and since music is the expression of human emotion, it’s so much better when it’s not perfect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.