Update on NaNoWriMo and laziness

**Note: My apologies! After knowingly hitting the "Publish" button on my last two blog entries neither of them seemed to have gone live. I'm not sure if this was a Blogger error or my own personal error by exiting out of my browser too quickly afterwards but either way this is a major problem. Again, sorry about that and enjoy this and future posts! - NSL

Hey, this is my longest title ever. Go me!

After getting myself all worked up to start and (hopefully) finish NaNoWriMo, the first day of the month came and I didn’t start, due to being out of town for ILMEA Jazz. The second day came and I still didn’t start. Here I am, much later, and I haven’t gotten barely anything written. So much for my longwinded, get-myself-motivated post from last time. I enjoy writing but, as I’ve seen during this month, it’s hard to get myself mentally ready to write when you’re not already in the mood. After taking a few days off from motivation, the mood was gone, thus making me less excited about the process. I know I’m terribly lazy sometimes, and that’s the focus on the rest of this post.

I have a very specific time that I like to be productive. This doesn’t include school work because I like to get that out of the way as fast as I can, but if I’m working on a piece of music, an important email, practicing violin, mostly anything else, I will procrastinate that thing until the very last moment I’m able to do it. That is, unless I get in the mood to do that thing between the hours of 10pm and 1am.

I once spent that entire time practicing violin. It had been a long week, during sophomore year, and I was awake, so I got it out and just played. I write a lot, and I mean a lot, of music during that time because my brain decides that it’s just that time of the day.

However, if it’s not that time of the day, and I’m finished with homework or chores or anything else, I will become one of the laziest people on planet Earth. I will lie on my bed doing nothing, I will watch YouTube videos, Netflix, anything that requires zero brain power. It’s terrible. I honestly don’t know why I do it; I feel really groggy and overall bad after an hour and a half of nothing, and I wish I could get myself to do something not completely unproductive. I guess it will just take will power and practice but for now, I will wait for the witching hour to scare my laziness away.

College

**Note: My apologies! After knowingly hitting the "Publish" button on my last two blog entries neither of them seemed to have gone live. I'm not sure if this was a Blogger error or my own personal error by exiting out of my browser too quickly afterwards but either way this is a major problem. Again, sorry about that and enjoy this and future posts! - NSL

This weekend I started visiting colleges. In four days I was on three campuses that I am somewhat interested in: Illinois Wesleyan, Columbia College Chicago, and Eastern Illinois University. My plan right now is to study music composition but I'm keeping my eyes and options open for something that might interest me down the road.

After visiting Illinois Wesleyan it looked like a prime candidate. I had met some of the music staff after doing some IMEA activities there and they seemed as good as any other college would have. I was also interested in the number of people in the classes: IWU only has about 2,100 students total, I would assume, since they are known for their nursing program, enrollment in the music program would be small, and even smaller for the composition program. I thought I would like a smaller atmosphere, so I thought the Wesleyan trip was a worthwhile one.

The next day I traveled up to Chicago to go to Columbia College's open house. They filed everyone into the amazing Auditorium Theater just off of Michigan Ave. downtown, and put on a huge show for everyone. There were dancers, a choir, a rock band covering a U2 song whose singer was the head of the music department. It was quite the production, and they made it clear their focus was in the arts. The campus is spread out over about six buildings in downtown Chicago, most shared with other businesses or universities. The apartments were also spread out and shared, and many had a great view of Lake Michigan. I then thought that having a college experience in a big city would be the best thing for me; I had always been someone who likes bustle.

On Monday I went down to Eastern Illinois, not for a formal visit or open house, but for Jazz Combo Day, something I had signed up for about a month in advance. I have a very good relationship with the jazz faculty there and they have been helping me become a better musician for the last two years I've been going to their summer camp in July. I talked to the percussion professor about what I was interested in doing in college and he got me an appointment to meet with the composition teacher, which was completely unprecedented and a great thing for him to do. I met with him and we just talked about the classes and course structure for the four years. They do have very small class sizes there; there are a total of eight composition undergrad and graduate students. This means everyone gets to know their teacher and learn in a one-on-one environment, which I think is great.


Truthfully, all of these colleges are still on my list, they each have something that is valuable to me. I have started very early with my college search and I hope it helps me come senior year.

A different type of writing

When I was much younger I thought that my future was a lot closer than it was. I feel like this happens to a lot of children; they have a plan of what they want to do (my little cousin wanted to be a "cooker in the morning and a mommy in the day" for a long time) and then get to about our age and look back and can laugh about their career choices from when they were four or five. For me, that occupation was being a fiction writer. I was constantly coming up with little stories and trying to write them down with my terrible little-kid handwriting (which, truth be told, hasn't gotten much better since) and read them to my family. My mother would often chuckle and tell me I did a good job and my father would give me constructive criticism. Most of us probably know how well constructive criticism goes over with small children. He would say that I needed to have "less dialogue" and tell more about what the characters were doing. I would try and fail. I got to a mixture of angry and disappointed and decided I didn't want to be a writer anymore.

I still kept thinking of little stories though. Little by little I started coming out of my shell and would start writing again. In fifth grade I went to a competition with a story I had written and illustrated (a very big deal for me at the time) with a story about a family who lived inside a volcano. I ended up going and winning second place for the age group, I don't quite remember what it was. This should have influenced me to keep writing stories, but honestly it didn't. I put the whole writing thing aside while music started becoming the main focus in my life.

Last year, I first heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which, if you don't know, is a challenge that has you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. I read about it in mid-October and decided I would give it a shot. The first day came along and I began writing. My initial idea was to have a group of students sitting in a class that were all going through a rough time at home, school, with friends, etc. and, in the end, they all were coming to the same moment of "zen," or clarity, and all thinking, even maybe for just a second, that everything would turn out in their favor later on, it's purpose to show how the human mind can subconsciously work. I started work on the first of November, completing about 2,500 words just that day. The next three or four days were progressively less productive and by about a week in I had given up. I still wanted to continue thinking about this idea which I felt was a different kind of writing than a strange family who lived in a volcano, escaping an eruption just in the nick of time.

November starts pretty soon. I'm already signed up for NaNoWriMo and I already have this idea which has been fermenting in my brain for a year. My goal this time around is to get to at least 30,000 words before I think about quitting. I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with writing fiction and I'm glad that I have at least the will power to try and finish this year.

This summer, pt. 2

I really did have an amazing summer. On top of the four and a half weeks of music camps, I had the privilege of having a full orchestral piece of mine played by a professional orchestra.

I'll back up. In the summer of 2013, the Urbana Pops Orchestra announced a composition contest. They did this the year before, I had submitted something, but it was pretty terrible. Not surprisingly, I didn't win. However, this time I was ready. I had started to work on my original idea from the previous summer again, and it was sounding alright, still not too good. I worked for three weeks straight on that thing and submitted it at the end of January. I waited for months for a response. Then, in mid-April, I ran into one of the conductors of the orchestra at Za's, of all places. We chatted a little bit, he and his family had been friends of ours for a few years, and then he said that they had selected a winner for the competition, and would love to play my piece. I thanked him profusely, and was super, annoyingly giddy for a few days afterwards. After this, I got in touch with the guy who judged the composition, a professor at Colombia College in Chicago for "Music of the Screen." He gave me comments on the piece and I took pretty much everything he said to heart. I really, really wanted this thing to be good.

What happened from that time to the performance was kind of a blur. I was actually in the orchestra who was playing my piece, back in the percussion section, but I had asked to not play during it. There were more qualified percussionists to play my piece back there than myself. We were playing some really great music during that concert. After the first rehearsal, I sat back and thought about this. My piece had a certain "Americana" quality to it, and that really clashed with the rest of the program, which featured some like this (like John Williams' "Jurassic Park", "Raiders of the Lost Ark") but others (like Saint-Seans "Bacchanale," look it up) that did not. I tried to shrug off this feeling and focus on my playing and not as much on my piece; it was kind of out of my hands at this point.

The night of the concert came way too quickly. Naturally, as they do, my entire extended family came. When we got to the venue, I started to freak out just a little bit. Not too much, I kept to myself, but I was sweating, trembling, going overall insane. I played on highlights from "Jurassic Park" (which, by the way, is an amazing piece, one of my favorites, and frankly scared me so bad to have played before mine) and went down into the audience. It was really hard to sit there and enjoy it. I was still in semi-freakout mode, and this was all a little much. But I eventually calmed myself down. I listened. They were doing a really fantastic job. I was so glad that I had pushed myself and taken the time to get this done, revise it, submit it, and be there for it.

This preceded the first camp I went to by about a week, and when I showed up at Blue Lake, the euphoria was still there. I was ready to learn from one of Tchaikovsky's most majestic works (his fourth symphony) on how to improve at what I do.
 
If you want to listen to it, here's a link to the performance of my piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUwnlojYgKk

This summer, pt. 1

I went to 4 and a half weeks worth of music camps this summer. That may seem like a huge chunk of my summer just went down the tubes, doing nothing but work and traveling from one to the other. That is entirely not the case. This was definitely the most fulfilling summer I can remember, mostly because it helped me realized that I really do want to dedicate my life to composing music.

The first camp I went to was out in the middle of the woods with no internet, no news, no phones (good God), and the only form of communication with the outside world was via snail mail. It was called Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. We played a great piece, the fourth symphony by Peter Tchaikovsky. It was a really long, intense, and insanely hard piece. Our conductor was very intimidating as well. During my week and a half there, however, I thought less about the violin part I was playing and more about the compositional aspect of the piece. For those that don't know (which I would assume is most of you), Tchaikovsky had a rough life. He was a closeted gay man living in oppressive Russia in the middle of the 19th century, thrown into a marriage he didn't want to be in, and he died of what some believe may have been suicide. This symphony reflects that terrible time in his life, and it's some deep source material for an amazing piece of art. When the conductor would stop and work sections with other groups of the orchestra, I would listen and try to see where that fit into something else I'd heard from another group in that same section earlier, or how it fit with my part. I had kind of started getting really deep into the compositional side of things.

I also went to a percussion camp this summer at Indiana University in Bloomington. This was an interesting experience, mostly because I had had no idea that there was such a huge market for solo percussion pieces. Needless to say, this really interested me. There was a speaker there, his name was Casey Cangelosi, who is fairly famous in percussion circles throughout the world. I learned a lot from him as he was a composer and amazing performer who uses a lot of repetition as well as techniques mainly on marimba and snare drum that can get a lot more out of the instrument than just a plunk or a hit. The second I got home from this camp I started working on a solo marimba piece, and have since gotten pretty much nowhere. But, because of all the things I learned about the technique and how to compose for the instrument at Indiana, I will probably go back and work on it, and try to make it sound passable. One day.



to be continued...

Career choice

I know exactly what I want to do in college.

I've actually had a few different ideas of what I've wanted to do since my freshman year, but it's all been in the same field: music. I've fluttered between Violin and Percussion Performance, because for a long time I was devoted to wanting to make people happy by playing other peoples music. It wasn't until this summer when I realized I'd rather be trying to make people happy by writing my own.

It's no easy feat; trying to find the time and the inspiration to write a piece of music that's worth listening to takes a lot of time. There are many variables that you need to figure out as you go along, such as what compositional program you'll spend the $500 on so you can get your piece down faster than traditional pen and paper, where you get your inspiration, what former composers you want to emulate, etc. I settled on buying a program called Sibelius 7, which is a very easy-to-use professional level program. Since getting it in January, I've had a great time learning and mastering it.

Another variable is inspiration. This is a really hard one to figure out. It took me years to even find classical composers who I wanted to emulate, and another few years to get the music theory knowledge to learn to actually write like them. More on that later, but it was a very important step in me wanting to become a composer.

There's another aspect to inspiration, though, which has to do with environment. The music aspect is almost completely taken out of the equation here. You have to ask yourself, "where do I want to go where I can relax and take in the setting?" For some people that may be somewhere completely quiet, serene, tranquil. I used to live in Monticello, IL and I would like to travel out to Allerton Park, which had trails through forests as well as a fairly sizable grassy area. It was completely quiet. I couldn't think of a single thing while out there. When things get too quiet around me, my mind starts to race and I go a little insane. For me to write interesting music (and not just single long notes over a long span of time, which is what comes to me from being too far into nature) I have to have a little bit of noise, some people chatting, some birds, cars driving by, etc. For me, I like to walk through Champaign-Urbana, or if I'm feeling especially lazy, sitting on my deck in my backyard. There's enough bustle there; not too much, but quiet enough I can still enjoy nature without it being overbearing, and I love it.

Long story short, (although not too short at this point) I find some of the most joy in my life in writing music, even though the process itself is clicking notes into a computer program, the way that hearing my music played back on a computer, and eventually an orchestra, feels, is amazing.