Swan Tower

I've spent the past several days (and have several more to come) gear-shifting between three radically different writing projects. On the one hand, I'm taking this approach because I know my brain can't just buckle down and slam all the way through one of them in a concentrated go; eventually it starts emitting steam and high-pitched whistles, and then I have to stop or switch to something else. On the other hand, that means I'm putting a different sort of strain on it, by asking it to get into a totally different mode on very short notice.

Thank god for the tactics I developed years ago.

It started out as a way to get myself into the headspace of a novel on days when I didn't want to write. Well, no, that's a lie; it started out as an accident: me being obsessed with a ten-minute trance remix of a particular song and listening to it on loop while I happened to be writing what eventually turned into Lies and Prophecy. But it became that thing I just said, and so I got in the habit of associating particular music with particular books. These days it's more often whole playlists rather than single songs; the former is slightly less insanity-inducing than the latter, but also (if we're being honest) a bit less effective.

This helps SO MUCH when I have to do this kind of gear-shifting. Even though two of the projects are new enough and small enough that they don't actually have associated music, I picked out an album in one case, a genre playlist in the other, and when I'm done with A and it's time for B, I change the music. And it helps. My brain goes, "Oh, techno? I absolutely cannot think about Previous Project with that going on. What else is on offer?" And then I open up the file for Next Project and we're off.

I'm not claiming it's foolproof. Also, not everyone can write to music (it's worth noting that the vast majority of what I listen to is either instrumental or in languages I don't speak well enough to be distracted by), so it's not a tactic that can work for everybody. Possibly you could sub in things other than music, like beverages or sitting in different parts of the house, though I think those would be weaker insofar as they're less likely to evoke particular genres, settings, and moods. But if you can do this: hoo boy does it help.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/zm2fHq)

(Really it should have begun about six months ago, but best intentions, etc. etc.)

The Harvard Band has a long tradition of crusties — former band members — coming back for certain events. Every five years, there is a formal reunion.

Next month is the 100th.

So naturally I’m going. And when I filled out the questionnaire, I checked the boxes that said yes, I intend to march, and yes, I would like to play while I do so . . . in the full awareness that I haven’t played horn since, uh, 2002. Seventeen years is more than enough time to lose one’s embouchure.

Which is why there’s now a small silver mouthpiece sitting on my desk. While I read things online, or otherwise dink around doing things that don’t require me to be typing, I’m tootling away with the mouthpiece, reminding myself of exactly how fast those tiny little muscles in your lips can tire out. The goal is to be able to at least vaguely acquit myself as something resembling a former musician by the time of the reunion in the middle of next month. I’m hoping that remembered skill will mean I do at least slightly better than I did after a month and a half of practice the first time I picked up a French horn. I probably won’t have anything resembling a high range anymore, nor much in the way of breath control, but I’m successfully producing arpeggios in a variety of different keys, so that’s a good sign, right?

This is absurd. And I know it. But I’m doing it anyway.

You can tell a lot about a person from their music. Hit shuffle on your iPod, MP3 Player, etc. and put the first 10 songs! One rule, no skipping!

(I’m leaving out the part where I’m supposed to tag ten more people to do this.)

I guess I’ll go with the playlist I’ve been slowly assembling for Chains and Memory. This isn’t the soundtrack; it’s just the music I’ll be going through when I pick stuff for the soundtrack. As such, it skews toward techno, rock, and more modern-sounding scores (whereas the playlists for the Memoirs, to choose a contrasting example, avoid those exact things).

1. “The Magic Wedding,” Cirque du Soleil, CRISS ANGEL Believe
2. “The X-Jet,” Michael Kamen, X-Men
3. “Mater Gloria,” Lesiem, Mystic Spirit Voices
4. “. . . He’s been arrested for espionage,” Harry Gregson-Williams, Spy Game
5. “Written in the Stars,” Ramin Djawadi, Clash of the Titans
6. “CWN Annwn,” Glenn Danzig, Black Aria
7. “Amnesia,” Dead Can Dance, Anastasis
8. “No More Sorrow,” Linkin Park, Minutes to Midnight
9. “Creeping Death,” Apocalyptica, Plays Metallica by Four Cellos
10. “There’s Only Me (Instrumental)”, Rob Dougan, Furious Angels

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

There’s a particular . . . sound effect? I don’t even know if that’s the right word to apply. It’s a quality sometimes heard in the background beat of techno songs. I have a hard time describing it in words (and can’t think of any examples to link to, since I hate the songs that do this and therefore always turn them off) — it’s kind of this muffled effect at the end of the beat that then slides into the sharp beginning of the next one — but the easiest way for me to summarize it is, it makes me feel like I’m being punched in the eardrums. Repeatedly. Ad nauseam.

I don’t suppose anybody a) knows what I’m talking about and b) can tell me whether it has a specific name?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

I don't know what it was -- my early education in piano; natural sense of pitch; heck, maybe even the ballet training -- but something apparently wired my brain to closely associate music with stories. And over the last ten years or so, I've taken that tendency and made it foundational to how I work.

I've been thinking about this because I finally, after a variety of false starts, have figured out the "sound" for the Dragon Age game kniedzw and I are running. I realized that Ramin Djawadi's music for Game of Thrones fit really well, so I went looking for more of his work, and simultaneously started browsing through the scores for other shows in the genre John Perich dubbed Blood, Tits, and Scowling. Trevor Morris' work on The Tudors and The Borgias falls into precisely the tone I'm looking for. So I'm slowly acquiring music and building out playlists for various moods -- creepy scenes, grand scenes, battle scenes, etc. And as I do so, the game coheres in my head.

This is why I was asking for Polynesian music earlier (and by all means, bring on more recommendations!). It isn't that I can't write a book without building playlists for it . . . at least, I don't think so? I used to do it all the time. I'd have one or two "theme songs," and that was all I needed. But now, figuring out the sound of a story is part of my process. And it isn't just cat-vacuuming, I promise! In order to pick music, I need to know the feel I'm going for -- so picking music helps me decide on a feel. When I make an actual soundtrack, with track titles and everything, I make decisions about what the important parts of the story are, and what their shape is or should be. It's a musical outline.

Approaching it this way gets me thinking about the story from a new angle, with a different part of my brain. Music can route around all the fiddly little details and get to the heart of it, the mood and response I'm trying to evoke. Sometimes it even creates the story.

So if you'll pardon me, I need to go check out the soundtrack to Rome.

As mentioned before, I intend to blog my progress (at least in the early days) of dusting off my long-neglected piano skills. I'll have more detailed things to say in a while, but to start off with, I figured I'd give a run-down of what exactly I'm trying to play.

There are two basic categories. The first is "Operation Remember How It Goes." Right now I'm working on pieces I used to have memorized, and can play in their entirety or very near to it . . . so long as I don't think about what I'm doing. The instant I pay attention to my fingers, fffffffffft. Goodbye. My mother will be mailing a stack of old sheet music to me, so I'll be able to refresh my memory, and eventually move on to the pieces I can't play anymore, but used to know very well. For now, however, there are three major things in this category:

"No Holly for Miss Quinn" -- this is an Enya piece off Shepherd Moons that I taught myself to play by ear. It's very simple, and I really can still play all of it; I just have to not let my mind wander, or I end up stumbling onto the wrong arpeggio. I've been using it as a warmup, and the goal is to get back to the point where I can reliably play it in my sleep.

"Solfeggietto" -- C.P.E. Bach. One of the last pieces I learned, back when I was still taking lessons. It's a fun, impressive-sounding thing, but the basics of it aren't that hard; it's just hard to play well. Right now I forget bits and pieces and have to jump past them to continue on, so I'll either need to cudgel my brain into coughing up the rest, or wait for the sheet music to arrive. Then it will be time to act like a grown-up and do the exercises my piano teacher set me back in the day, that I hated at the time. They're boring as hell, but kind of necessary to make sure you play the piece evenly, without the sixteenth notes lurching around like drunkards.

"Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" -- J.S. Bach. Learned this, or rather the first part of it, at the same time as "Solfeggietto." I remember much less of it, and will definitely need the sheet music to get all of it back. But it's also fun and cool-sounding (especially now that I can play it with an organ tone instead of a piano one). Barring a few bits, it isn't very hard, either.

The second category of music are the project pieces, i.e. the new songs I'm trying to learn. Right now there are two of these, both chosen for their relatively low difficulty level.

"Roslin and Adama (Simplified Version)" -- I reported on this before. I'm nearly at the point where I can play both hands together at tempo; it's just a matter of getting myself reliably back to the point where my fingers (especially on my left hand) remember their way around a keyboard well enough that I don't have to watch them all the time. I also tried the non-simplified version briefly last night, and nearly fell over with hysterical laughter -- I don't think I have EVER played a piece that actually used that much of the piano's lowest register. The amount of time spent counting ledger lines before I could play the next chord . . . yeah. My brain needs more of a refresher course before I can do that one.

"O" -- from the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name. Again, my left hand needs to remember more of its former competence before I'll have this one down; there are too many stretched arpeggios that it has to be able perform without direct supervision. But we'll get there.

I have a few other things I'm dinking at, but that's most of it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go spend more time with the Precious . . . .

I figure I'll leave the question post open until I answer the last one. (At present, I probably have this post and one more to make.)

Also, you don't need an LJ account to post a comment -- I've resisted locking that down, despite the spam.

***

bookblather asked, How do you feel about Mary Queen of Scots?

My feelings there are . . . complicated.

I basically have two perspectives on her: the one acquired through reading Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, and the one acquired through writing Midnight Never Come. The latter is decidedly skewed toward Elizabeth's side of the tale, while the former is more partisan to the Scottish side (though I wouldn't say it's strongly so). Sometimes these two conflict, and which one wins out depends on my mood and what I had for breakfast.

In general, I think her life was a deranged soap opera. All the parental drama and marriages and murders and imprisonment -- it's just crazy. I can't really imagine what it was like to live through that. One of these days I should really read a good biography of her life.

(Also, even when I'm feeling less than entirely sympathetic to her, I still think her execution was awful. Nobody should have to go through that.)

***

logovore asked, What fictional settings would you most like to (temporarily and safely) visit?

I appreciate the qualifiers, which change my answer rather substantially. :-)

The Chrestomanci 'verse from Diana Wynne Jones' books would be a great one; I'd love spirit-traveling around to the different worlds. Pern, because flying and going between sounds awesome. Pamela Dean's Secret Country, even though I don't know enough literary references to truly enjoy myself there. The Commonwealth of Letters from Silverlock, even though ditto. :-) Florin, from The Princess Bride, just to say I'd been there. The World of Two Moons, from Elfquest.

The funny thing about trying to answer this question is, I have a hard time separating the setting from the roles within it. I can't think of Pern without also thinking of having my own telepathically bonded dragon. I can't think of Chrestomanci without imagining myself as an enchantress within it. Do I get to be special in these worlds? Or am I just me, with no skills or benefits I don't already have? That affects my opinion quite a lot.

Any way you slice it, though, almost all of my answers are places I've had in my head since childhood. It seems the settings I've read about more recently don't flip that "I wish I could go there" switch in my brain.

***

wshaffer asked, If you were a rock star*, what instrument would you play, and what would your band be called?

I'd be the keyboardist, probably. (My two instruments are piano and French horn, and while I could name some random instrument I don't actually play, the truth is there's no instrument I love enough on concept alone to overcome my love for the ones I know in reality.)

As for a name, that's harder. What kind of band is this? (I take "rock star" in a broad sense; it isn't necessarily a rock band in genre terms.) Let's say we do sort of world-folk fusion, with maybe some electronic and percussive elements on particular songs. I'm sort of tempted to call it "Cabinet of Curiosities" or "Kunstkammer" or something of that sort, but that makes us sound steampunky, which isn't necessarily what I'm after. I dunno. It's cheating on the principle of these posts, maybe, but I'll hand this one back to the commentariat: what do you think such a band should be called?

Does anybody else do this?

I'll be listening to a piece of music, something I've heard plenty of times before -- frequently it's a track from some film score, though other kinds of music can do it, too. Then suddenly, my ears shift focus, in much the same way I imagine those "magic eye" pictures resolve from meaningless noise into meaningful shapes (I actually can't see those worth a damn). I find myself listening through the music to a layer I never noticed before.

I don't know if that makes any sense. It would be easier to explain in person; I would put a piece of music on and wave a hand in the air to illustrate which harmonic line I've switched focus to. (It's always a harmony; the melody is what I'm listening past.) Not infrequently it's something the bass elements are doing, because they more often provide the foundation or embroidery to the melody in the treble -- but sometimes it's a high counterpoint I never really noticed before, or something in the middle registers that was somehow tucked away inside all the other things I'd heard before.

(I sometimes wonder if the way my brain processes music qualifies as synaesthesia. I often conceive of it in spatial or kinetic terms, and I was annoyed when I found out that "texture" didn't mean what I wanted it to, musically speaking. Individual sounds have texture, goddammit, although it isn't the same as the texture I feel with my fingertips. I guess I mean "timbre," but my brain insists that no, if it mean timbre it would say timbre, and what it said was texture.)

In other words, I shift my attention to an instrument or line I hadn't noticed before -- but it really feels like I'm listening through to it. As if the rest of the instrumentation was the reflection on a glass window, and I just now managed to look past that into what lies behind the glass. It just happened to me a moment ago, sparking this post -- "Pageant," from the Cirque du Soleil show Kà, for anybody who's curious; there's a bass counterpoint that suddenly leapt out at me -- and if you can do the trick, Michael Kamen's score for Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves is a lovely, lovely thing to listen to, especially the track "The Abduction and Final Battle at the Gallows." That's the first piece that ever refocused for me, and I still love to close my eyes and follow all the different layers as they come in and out.

But yeah. I'm almost certainly not the only one who does this, but I sometimes wonder, and isn't that what the internets are made for? I'd love to hear how other people experience music in general, whether you process it in terms of other senses or whatever. Tell me I'm not alone in being weird. :-)

I mentioned some time ago that Bear McCreary, composer of the score for Battlestar Galactica, had released a book of piano arrangements from that show. After squeeing over this, I promised to report back once I'd had a chance to test them out . . . but I forgot all about it, until yhlee gave her own report. So here, much delayed, are my thoughts, on both the arrangements and my own experience with two sessions of playing.

So, um. First. My skill at playing piano? Not what it used to be. I took roughly seven or eight years of lessons, but that ended around 1993. I continued to play casually while I lived at home, but haven't had regular access to a piano since 1998. Kept playing French horn until 2001, which means I can still read treble clef without too much trouble -- mostly; once you get up into the ledger lines I have a lot more trouble, since horns rarely go above a high G -- but gah, bass clef. When I sat down to try out these arrangements, I was actually having to do the thing where you go "Okay, that space is C, so this is E, G, okay, the note is an A-flat." Really. My sight-reading ability warmed up with renewed use, but it's still verrrrry slow.

The really funny part, though, is the extent to which I still have certain reflexes, but they don't work right anymore. I'll be going along, eyes on the music, okay now that left-hand chord is a fifth -- but my hand doesn't quiiiiiiite remember how it should position itself for a fifth, so I hit a sixth instead, and then have to stop and look at the keyboard to figure out why the music sounds terrible.

Mind you, this being Bear McCreary, sometimes the reason it sounds terrible is that I'm playing too slowly. And that's where we get into the arrangements, instead of my butchery thereof.

See, the reason I love his music is its complexity. He has lots of odd, syncopated rhythms, weird harmonies that aren't quite what you'd expect, extensive use of both the high and low ends of the staff, etc. And it turns out that all those things I like when I'm listening . . . become a nightmare when I have to play them. How do you count this bit? What the hell is that note three ledger lines below the staff? Is the chord crunchy because I overlooked an accidental, or because it's a deliberately discordant suspension that would sound a lot better at tempo? At my level of non-skill, it can be surprisingly hard to tell.

I haven't attempted everything yet; my focus has been on my favorite pieces. To rank those in order of difficulty:

"Roslin and Adama" (simplified) -- with a bit more practice, I'd be able to play this one just fine, and probably upgrade to the non-simplified version soon after.

"Kara Remembers" -- a small amount of practice would get me to the point where I could play the primo line of the duet. The secondo part, not so much; see previous statements re: odd syncopated rhythms, and fill in lots of sixteenth notes.

"The Shape of Things to Come" -- a much larger amount of practice might bring this one within reach. I blundered my way through the entirety of this one during my second session, nowhere near up to tempo, and was very proud of myself for being able to dust off my musical skills and work out how to count the bits in the last line. (For the curious: it's in 6/8, and each 3 consists of an eighth note, a sixteenth-note triplet, and another eighth note. Been a while since I had to deal with anything like that.) So this one is achievable, I think.

"Prelude to War" -- ahahahaha NO. This one is, shall we say, aspirational. In large part for reasons of tempo: this one contains lots of very rapid sixteenth-notes in a pattern whose name I can't remember. (What do you call it when you have a three-note arpeggio cycling across a 3/4 measure? GBDG BDGB DGBD. I know there's a term for this.) Anyway, it's is currently way out of my reach, though by the time I get to anything resembling competence with "The Shape of Things to Come," I could probably tackle this one.

I should also try "Passacaglia," which looks entirely feasible.

In general, I would say this book has been handing me my head. But if you ask me what I think of it . . . well, visualize me clapping my hands together and bouncing up and down with an idiot grin. Probably the best recommendation I can give is that after two sessions of playing at a friend's house, I'm seriously looking into the possibility of acquiring a keyboard for myself. And not one of yer wimpy little short-range plastic keyboards, either, but an 88-key weighted-hammer machine -- a piano that happens to be digital. (I'd get an actual piano, but we have even less space for that than we do for a keyboard, and it would be a pain in the ass to tune/move/etc.) I've purchased another book of piano arrangements -- Cirque du Soleil music this time, which I can also report on later if there's interest -- and want to photocopy the stuff I left at home, too. So in short, this book has re-awakened my love of playing piano, and I really can't think of a higher recommendation.

arielstarshadow, a while ago -- where "a while" is "about six months" -- you mentioned you'd be interested in seeing my playlists for the Onyx Court books, the stuff I had on shuffle while writing, that the soundtracks got built out of. Well, since I recently found myself with occasion to mail those playlists to someone, I figured I might as well go ahead and put them up on my website. The Midnight playlists are here, and the Ashes playlists are here.

They're just .txt files, and moderately illegible; when iTunes exports a playlist, it includes all the file information, and it was already enough work just cleaning out the chaff so you could see what the titles, composers, and albums were. I didn't feel like doing even more work to make it pretty. Also, most of it is film scores. But if that's the kind of thing you're interested in -- especially the dark-and-atmospheric end of film scores -- you can scan through and see what I've been listening to.