: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
The Lollipop Guild.
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The Lollipop Guild.

Liner Notes: The World and Me. 2/12

In grade school each year they’d take us to see something called a “Lollipop Concert”. We’d sit in the front rows of the hall that the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra played in while each musician introduced us to an instrument. Then they’d play a few pieces: “Peter and the Wolf” and some others, but the most important for me, the one they would always play, because I think we always went in the fall around Halloween, was the Saint-Seans masterpiece, “Danse Macabre”.

Love. That’s what it was. I still love it, it’s been practically my whole life, and I can’t get over hearing it that first time. Those concerts are where I first dreamed about writing for an orchestra; before that, the closest I had ever seen was a black and white film of Cab Calloway decked out in a white zoot suit, maniacally conducting his band – half with his baton and half with his crazy hair. Then there was a very funny Bugs Bunny cartoon, but that conductor was kind of the villain. We were all five, and probably somewhat adorable, and it took me until about two years ago to realize why they gave us all lollipops, but I never needed one because I was just awestruck, listening to the orchestra play.

So here I am, finally, finishing some of my orchestral pieces.

Yep.

Here I am.
I’m doing that.


If I may take just a moment:

there is a semi famous phrase, which holds the odd coincidence of being attributed to a lot of people I really admire : Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Elvis Costello, and even my Fresh Air Fund™ pretend dad Frank Zappa, which goes:

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I’ve had a little while to think about that, and it’s true; a season of columns (that most people read and don’t listen to) about composing a ballet is not a well worn path to walk. But I think this may be more about my relationship with the music than the music itself. In any case, let me get you up to speed with some hearty backstorying:


In 1986 I spent the summer working in Los Angeles. I was a Universal Studios tour guide. (We’ll come back to that at a later point.) Anyway, while in training there I met a girl

who was a dancer

and as I was a composer I thought it might be cool to write her something to dance to

so I asked her all about her life and she told me and then I wrote some themes based on what she’d said

and maybe I thought she might go out with me once I finished it but that was a long shot

but she did go out with me but way before I finished the music

and without all the broody alone time to walk the moors and sing into a tape recorder I didn’t get to finish it that summer

and then, much later on, we stopped dating

and the project kinda went into turnaround

not because we weren’t dating, but by then I had to graduate from college and get a job in a recession and the days were just packed.


But I didn’t forget about it. I kept at it, humming ideas into a 4 track cassette tape recorder.

Then, in the late 90’s, I bought a Roland PMA-5 sequencer; it’s a little machine about the size of a trade paperback collection of the complete works of Emily Dickinson. I carried that around for months, tapping on a grey little screen with a little tiny stylus…programming six movements, note by note.

A couple of years later I exported those files (in a computer language called MIDI) to one of those first iMacs (the ones that came in the bright colors that looked like intelligent candy), and from there to

an orchestral scoring program,
then a full paper orchestral score,
then another computer program that actually sounded like instruments.

It’s important to note that none of this technology existed when I first started this. Back then, my only hope of this being real was a commission from an orchestra somewhere, which wasn’t impossible but was, y’know, impossible.

Also, have you seen me? Do I look traditionally responsible (or, responsibly traditional) enough that you’d lend me 100 musicians and your acoustically balanced room for a week? Well, thanks Mom, I know you would, that’s very very nice of you, but the point is that it was not gonna happen for me back then.

But now? Technology. I’m fine. Technology allows me to make any kind of sound I want, and place it literally anywhere on the planet.

And that is the problem.

I now have over 2692 files pertaining to this project. Most of them are copies of copies of back ups from 512k floppy discs to ZIP discs to CDs to hard drive after hard drive… think about trying to save one file over the last 30 years of digital evolution. Yes, I did print out the entire thing, but again, you can’t hear that, so I rendered out audio versions every five years or so with whatever new program I had learned.

Each one of these versions represents me trying to get back to that concert, but standing on stage rather than sitting in the audience.

I’d still take a lollipop.


So this week, I started going through all those files.

Let me tell ya, it was crazy. Just me in my headphones saying things like “What was I thinking?” and “That’s not right!” out loud to myself. My daughter came in and patted me on the head. This year, as a family, we are listening to a classic album a week, all the way through, while we draw or paint or something, and the first one was The Beatles “Let It Be”, but the version they made a few years ago without all the horns and strings added by Phil Spector (against their wishes, actually). It’s just four people and some instruments and some of the greatest music ever.

Fresh from that experience, and not at all critical, my daughter listened to my latest version of the beginning of the ballet.

“It sounds like a State Farm commercial,” she told me, “and then turns into the sad part of the soundtrack in an Avengers movie.”

She’s right: there was a time I used to be involved in advertising and watch a great deal of superhero movies and that seemed to come through clearly in my artistic expression.


My original idea was to find the best bits of each version I’ve created and then put them together in one, but then I got all philosophical and realized I can’t go back 30 years to the original and “re-do” it, I can only really be who I am right now. That’s who we all are, all the time, the surviving bits of who we’ve been, all mixed together, walking around, drinking coffee.

Think about that project you’ve had on the back burner for a really long time, maybe home improvement or a recipe you’ve wanted to try… if you keep it long enough the world around you changes, and you actually need a bigger bookshelf or you don’t eat that much sugar anymore, wow, see what I mean, Dancing About Architecture. I hope that you enjoyed my fox trot to the NeoClassical. Next week let’s cha-cha to Bauhaus.

State Farm. Hey, at least she compared it to professional music that people paid for. I appreciate that.

[Here is a link to the very first audio file of the ballet’s first movement, and then the later version I played my daughter.]

https://on.soundcloud.com/xUU5U

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: lower black pain
: lower black pain.
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