#composing music

Im writing a song for absolutely no reason and it's probably going to be the only song I will ever write lol

presave it on spotify if you want, it will be on all streaming services :3

give it a couple streams if you wanna support a broke ahh uni student i guess lmao. and if you wanna buy it on apple music or wherever, it’s as cheap as i was able to make it

releasing april 30th at midnight in your timezone

preview available on youtube, linked on the presave page!

I was very excited to see Tár because I love:

Classical music

Orchestral conducting

Seeing people at pianos

Seeing people make notations on staff paper

The promise of seeing these things is more than enough to lure me into a movie theatre.

Not relevant to my excitement was:

Moral panic

I did not go in with a feeling that the movie would have interesting things to say about holding people accountable for abuses of power. This is not because I have anything against Todd Field, whose directorial/writing work I'm not familiar enough with to pass that kind of judgment. I just feel that it is a tough needle to thread, and I would have been pleasantly surprised to see it done right, and I always reserve the hope of being pleasantly surprised. I was not—not by that—but there were still things I appreciated.

BLACKWING CAMEO

That was a nice flourish of affection for the romance of composing in analog mode: the sight of a box of Blackwing pencils in LT's pencil vault. I did not get the chance to see if she had any Alpheus Music Writer pencils (LB's brand).

I would love to watch anything—documentary, affectionate feature film—about the heartache involved in being devoted to dead stock pencils.

A FAIR AMOUNT OF ORCHESTRA

The strongest feeling with which I emerged from my experience of watching Tár was that someone out there needs to win my heart by declaring themself the next Frederick Wiseman and make me a four (plus!) hour documentary that just follows the administration of a major symphony orchestra. The meetings! The committees! The sections! The drudgery! The paperwork! The tuning up! The rehearsals! The commuting! The work-life balance! The negotiations! The board! The fundraising! The music programming! Everything! This is what I want. For my money, there could have been way more orchestra.

MEETINGS IN RESTAURANTS WITH DARK PANELED WOOD WALLS AND WHITE CUPS AND WHITE TABLE CLOTHS

I did not need quarantine to teach me that there are few luxuries more poignant, significant, and comforting to me than a fancy place to get coffee, but the mere sight of people in a restaurant I'd like to be in is enough to move me to tears. The German locale specifically beat hard on the strings of my heart dedicated to Café Sabarsky.

THE RUSSIAN CELLIST

It's not my movie. Somebody else made it, it's done. But if my take had been solicited, I would have concentrated a lot more time and tension into the part of the plot that engages with the young Russian cellist who is so familiar with the games inherent in her field that she takes them on readily and with naked disdain.

VINYL GRIPES

New classical recordings should all be issued on vinyl and they never are.

PANGENDER JUILLIARD STUDENT

I cannot think of another movie I've seen in a theatre where a character has to, under duress, articulate their identity as something not-cis, and I was touched by how much the performer in the role shows that it sucks. The reactionary fantasy seems to involve a college student screaming the qualities of their identity that an unknowing authority figure ought to know, while the reality is that it is the worst thing to have to introduce and always feels like it is crawling out of you in a way that is mortifyingly unimpressive because plenty of people do not need to articulate their identities, but we do. At the same time, I did not love the scene and question its relevance. I guess that it did demonstrate LT's penchant for dying on a hill, but I am not convinced that the use of the straw man did not utterly mute the point that this character cannot meet anybody on their own terms but will mandate the terms until everybody turns over or flickers out.

(Was the scene filmed at Juilliard? It captured the building's steepness.)

INTERTIORS

I love the apartment LT shares with her family and the studio. There did not need to be any more action in this movie than somebody noodling at various grand pianos trying to manifest what they hear in their head. Of course, Cate Blanchett was great at it.

LENNY B!!!

CREATING MELODIES 

Sanka is at home dedicating himself to his work of COMPOSING MUSIC; He is inspired by nature and everything that surrounds him; Unlike Paulie, who is an "ear musician", Sanka can read musical notes and write them very well.

He is almost never alone, as many fairies and sparrow men admire his work and love to see him in his compositional task; He does not mind being visited, on the contrary, the company of others "inspires him more."

One of his most frequent visits is fairy Quill, who loves to see him write musical notes and create his harmonies. "I sculpt in stone and he sculpt in harmonies," she says.