About Me
I just got new hosting and I'm waiting for dns to propagate… and in the meantime, composing a new "about me". Over the years, ccrma's been good to me, so I decided to link to this blog instead of creating a brand new one. My password still works from 2005. Thanks for that faith in me.
About Me:
I'm a burner. And a flipcitizen. I like pure data and I use it in my classroom. My first yoga class was "Priscilla's Yoga Stretches" on PBS. I'm gen X, just barely, 1982, but we never had MTV. I attended Pasadena City College after university and I liked it better (sorry Stanford). I learned how to write. I'm leaving a lot out… how do you describe music friendships? I compose between five and ten pieces per year. Sometimes more. I got one of my big breaks at Stanford on Daniel Pearl Day, and another at Texas State San Marcos with the Orquestia del Rio. I like anatomy, chemistry, and languages as well as music.
I want to make the world a better place. don't you? doesn't everybody? I'm good at creating timely events. I have a spot-on time-sense. I can tell what time it is without a watch, even when I'm sleeping. I've met LaMonte Young, A. R. Rahman, and Jeremy Prynne, all of whom offered timely advice. I've sung a lot and I've worked with kids a lot. I've volunteered a lot. I compost. I like to go barefoot.
I do like to write music, I just don't know how. I don't know how I do it, I don't know how to control it or even if I should, and I don't know what it's for. And I don't know why I don't compose. I guess that's what this post is for, to document my search for a pattern. I left out most of the music stuff I've done because I'm sick of being pigeonholed, but I want to search for patterns in that too. It's just hard because music is full of feelings, and I never know what I'm going to get. Whether listening to old stuff or composing new. Never know. Anyway.
I know three things:
1. most of what I know about music is about one type of music made by a small group of people, relative to the world.
2. the music I learned about in school and books is almost totally different from the music I actually hear most of the time.
3. the ways I was taught to convey music (i.e. notation and conducting) are not welcomed by most of the musicians I know, and the ways I have successfully communicated music (i.e. dancing, hanging out and talking, and improvising) to musicians are almost totally not acknowledged in most classrooms and books.
So, to start over I would need to:
1. get a good sense of what music is out there and how it's conveyed and performed… and what it's used for.
2. forget books and the radio. figure out what music I actually like, that gives me shivers, and then discover what it is I like about it and what I can use it for, and how it makes me feel, and how it does that.
3. I don't know about this one. I think I need to get way more comfortable with notation and notation-world before I can say I haven't been able to express myself that way, which means theory, ear-training… it's okay, it's only half the battle. the other half, since I already know I can communicate with musicians and people, is to find out what people already call what I do, in various societies and contexts, e.g. free-improv, but it's not just free improv. it's also called impersonating the goddess, or trance dancing, and also a form of conducting. resist the temptation to get academic. a short definition is enough.
So!
A dictionary. A music dictionary. Thanks for listening! You have helped me come up with the concept.
You can check it out at adriancoburn.com... as soon as the dns propagates!