I'm so incredibly unfocussed here it's not funny. I don't know where the talent lies -- it's the old "carving the niche" problem. I *did* do a relative time score back in 3.0 (and *gawd* it's ugly when you try to make the translation because my approach wasn't a good one). I was hoping that I might get some insight as to what to push. I'm basically a hybrid guy -- it's music? Let me draw it. Cage? No problem. Crumb? Tricky but I'd be willing to accept the challenge. Chopin? It's a mountain of work, but I might be the guy to edit a new, highly readable edition. My composition teacher in grad school was a pupil of Stockhausen and they're now in some sort of competition to make a body of scientifically derived work. I've done some work in that arena but it's nowhere near finished because he's into Fluxus = giganticism and I'm not so sure I have several months to do a 96 piece absolutely unplayable avant-garde score with insurmountable layout issues. Not frightening to me, but comparable in intrumentational complexity to a Mahler score -- one of the raw scores that I have is 8 1/2" by 6', close to 60 pages (yes it's almost as tall as me, rolled up like seven editions of the Sunday NY Times) and makes Xenakis or Ligeti look *titchy*. It doesn't make my brain hurt, but I don't know what sort of value it would have were I to spend the three or four months solid work time completing it (that's if I did nothing else), solving the old problem of making Finale handle rhythm dynamics over and over.
A couple of suggestions:
- you might tell us more precisely in what field you plan to work in.
Most of my paid, accredited work is under a confidentiality agreement because it's for copyright disputes, so the bulk of my professional work goes completely out the window. It's not visually stunning either. But the musicologist that I'm working for pays me squat and my function in that world is to Make The Musicologist Look Good, and I need to be doing that for myself.
- why don't you post some samples on your web site so that anyone of us could have a look?Best ones are copyrighted (best lead sheet is Frank Zappa for instance, for an exercise that he would use to test people's outfreakage at his use of tuplets); I wouldn't want to irritate anyone with that because I'm well aware of all that. Very little that I've done is public domain, and much of my Finale work is under a confidentiality agreement, so I'm working feverishly on projects that *are* usable, but *aren't* my original pieces (which I don't consider so impressive -- my own music focuses on aspects of music that we have not been able to solve the notation problems yet).
On top of that, I'm the pits when it comes to advertising, not my forte (didn't know I'd need a website -- always been a bit shy of them -- so that means I gotta learn how to do it -- got an idea where to look but when I do it's gotta be *impressive* and that requires research, something I haven't done, and not sure what sort of time budget I need for it). I can't help but think all this work to make it exciting and flashy and beautiful isn't worth something so I'm a bit unsure as to how to proceed and nervous about posting work with that ideal for free. So until that problem is solved, I was hoping one-on-one might help out, considering the entire field is word of mouth (so I'm told).
I've got a handful of romantic pieces just finished, on the advice of a copyist who said, just grab scores and copy them just to get it into a file, and that's what I've been working on since I made the decision for a career change. For example I made a Dvorak folio of three violin/piano pieces with edited violin part, a trick because I'm *not* a violinist, and I know my model wasn't the best editing job. Double trick because I made it "one folio, one file." Schirmer might get after me for that because that's what it's based on. Another project just finished is an updated layout of a Chopin Polonaise (Op. 61, the fantasia one), but I'm trying to decide whether to respell it to get it out of complex enharmonic keys (the current version keeps all the b#-minor vanity). That one is interesting to me because I've always thought if Chopin's music weren't so *unreadable* it wouldn't be so scary for pianists, so the goal is to make it at least in the realm of sight-readable. Yet I'm unsure how to pitch such a project or whether it would go over well. (Even my professors said that I needed an agent!)
Current project -- an original layout of "Night On Bald Mountain" with parts, so that I'll have a full package (chosen because it's basically unfinished aside from Rimsky-Korsakov's score, the model, it's *fairly* short, and it gives me some sort of artistic leeway with layout -- it's imperative in my work that it is not only far more readable than what is currently available but it's also smaller in number of pages, etc.). I'm thinking of making a "sketch" score -- years ago I had one that converted it to a solo piano piece, and I actually learned to play some of it in that form. I don't remember who the publisher of that one was, so without that information, I'm thinking of making my own based on my own familiarity with the piece. Does this give you a clearer picture of where I've been and where I might head to? I'm very unfocussed at the moment and need to investigate my options but I *desperately* need help on that. I hope I'm asking the right people, and that someone takes an interest.
Thanks Keef.
Dennis
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