July 19, 2011

Chris Hancock called me this evening to give me the news that our letter drop game Swamp Talk is now available on the Apple App Store.  I excitedly downloaded it to my phone and started playing.  Even with all the practice I got during development, I still am terrible at it.  (Well, I did spend most of my time composing the music, not playing the game…) Erica has the knack of it.  She's a real wordsmith.

It's completely free for the next week, so I urge you to gobble it up.  Chris and his development team at Tertl Studos have some surprises coming up.  I can't wait to get good at it!

July 13, 2011

The new scrabble-meets-tetris word building game is on its way to Apple for approval before it can appear on the App Store later this month. Game designers at Tertl Studos in Montpelier, VT, just wrapped work on their flagship game product yesterday.

Swamp Talk takes you deep into a swampy virtual pad of paper where letters drift down from the margins. It's your job to turn these letters into words before they bump each other off the edge and fall into the swamp.

It's a quick, fun and addictive game that challenges your word skills like Scrabble and pushes your quick spatial problem solving the way visual puzzles do. Quite frankly, it was often hard to tear myself away from playing it to work on the sound design and music that help bring the game to life.

Chris Hancock is a long-time collaborator since I became his piano teacher back in the 1990's. His work at TERC and the MIT Media Lab has led him to create unique programming languages for kids and to his current work at his own Tertl Studos.

July 13, 2011

- The Edge / U2
I have no idea why. Like many things that get stuck in my ear, I haven’t listened to it in ages.

July 9, 2011

- Igor Stravinsky

This is one of the many mantras that I live by.  I find it more and more true as the range of projects I endeavor becomes more diverse.  This idea, that the more restricted you are in making something, the more free you are to make it, is as true now as it was in 1939 when Stravinksy delivered the Norton Lectures at Harvard.  

It uncouples the composer's ego from the music, and allows us to free ourselves from any kind of responsibility to "express" ourselves. Instead our guide, our main deity, is that of the creative box we've put ourselves in and to creating solutions to make our way out.  Expressing myself is not my job. It is to help realize the vision of a collaborator.  And that comes down to placing restrictions on the music.  Deciding what the music ISN'T, through process of elimination and whittling away at a vast array of ideas, reveals what it is destined to become.

July 5, 2011

Two school concerts, ten class-visits, and a family concert later, we wrapped up our kids series in Boston. 

It was hot in the basement of the Young Achievers School and stifling in the music room of the Haley School.  This latter classroom was nothing more than a bump-out in the school cafeteria, extra space that had been created by building a wall and sub-dividing the kitchen into two spaces.  The fans were loud and ineffective.

Nonetheless, percussionist Bill Manley, artistic director Deborah Boldin, and I presented our ideas to the third, fourth and fifth graders who came to these special music classes eagerly expecting something different than normal.  The ideas were mostly simple: that composers throughout history create pieces that evoke a sense of place, that a sense of place is special and that music has the power to transport us to distant lands and remind us of places we long to return to. 

The lesson activities centered around a piece I composed for the Chameleon Ensemble to play together with volunteers from the audience.  Together, we were going to create music of our shared place.

The kids learned to play music they would later perform with the professional musicians in concert.  My hope was to give the students a chance to experience music making not just from the outside as an audience member, yet not in the more customary way of preparing music over the course of many weeks for a culminating concert in school. 

Instead, I wanted to create a vehicle for the kids to sit in the music with professional musicians after a minimal amount of preparation.  So the piece required two layers: one was music scored normally for the pros.  The next layer was a set of simple tasks and repeating patterns that fit together with the pro part.  The piece opened with the students creating a rhythmic groove against which the musicians improvised.  The middle section involved a simple chord progression that the kids played on xylophones, over which the pros played bouncy, rhythmic melodies.  Yet another section had the percussionist directing the kids in playing cymbals and gongs ad lib while the pros played a lyrical theme. 

I was nervous about whether it would come together, about whether the musicians would find the music too simplistic in form, and especially whether the students would remember to listen while they played: would it completely fall apart?  Remarkably, in both school concerts, the kids did an amazing job. By the second one I felt confident enough to invite almost twenty kids on stage, and it was incredible.  It never ceases to amaze me what kids can do when you set a high bar, give them respect, and offer them unusual opportunities to try new things.

Of course, none of this would have happened without the persistent behind-the-scenes work of Deb, the brilliant musicianship of the seven Chameleons (Gary Gorczyca, Nancy Dimmock, Margaret Phillips, Rafael Popper-Keizer, Jesse Irons, Scott Woolweaver, and Bill Manley), and the support of music teachers Joy Roster and Kimani Lumsden.  As a former school music teacher myself, I know that this is one of the hardest jobs a musician could take on.  You are always in the limelight, yet rarely given the adequate scheduling or resources to do the kind of work you dream of.  Nonetheless, these two generously devoted several of their class sessions to our work with their students and supported us throughout the process.  For that I am very thankful.