MUSIC
On my “Miscellaneous Stuff” page I go into great detail about the music I
like. However… I also create music! After a few little
experiments as a piano student in my childhood, I began writing pieces in
earnest in 1982 or 1983.
Nonetheless, many people were generally unaware that I had any musical
ability. As a piano student in elementary school, I had average skills
but little or no interest in playing the piano. In high school I mellowed
out, decided to try again and became fairly good at reading and playing
music. But I was quite busy with other things and often did not have
sufficient time to practice. Besides, I
realized that, more than performing music, I really enjoyed composing
it! Consequently, my music tended to exist
more on paper than in an audible format.
In my
senior year of high school, I did manage to get two fellow students who played
the violin to assist me in performing and recording a piece I’d written in
1985, a trio for piano and two violins.
Although the recording is technically not very good and the piece is a
bit naïve by my current standards, I was really delighted to actually hear the
violin parts for the first time. That
was my first recorded piece – and until the summer of 2004, my only
recorded piece. I had written three
waltzes for piano first, followed by a very ambitious symphony, then the
trio. Before finishing high school I’d
written a string quartet. In college I
wrote little music, basically revising the quartet and composing a few very
short exercises for a composition class.
Mostly I was simply too busy to work on music, although I studied
recordings and sheet music and attended recitals and concerts frequently.
In
1990, a year before finishing college, I began composing a piano concerto for
my fiancée Lily. (As with the symphony,
I had no idea how this would ever get performed, but I didn’t let that worry me
too much.) I finished the first of its
projected three movements, then got sidetracked for a long time. In 1994, though, Lily, who plays the piano,
had an idea for a recital based on a “Nature” theme featuring keyboard music
from different musical periods. To
represent the Renaissance period she selected an English dance tune called “All
In a Garden Green.” With the help of my
brother Stefan, who is an expert on music from that time period, I began to
construct a piece based on the tune – my first commission! To make things more interesting, I included
a recorder (an instrument that actually existed in Renaissance times) and a
flute. This piece I actually finished,
but due to frequent interruptions it took two years! Although Stefan and a friend of ours named Katherine were
scheduled to play in this recital, the delay was simply too long. By 1996 Stefan and Katherine had both moved
away and Lily had put her recital idea on hold because of more pressing
obligations. Sigh…
In
2002, I began writing an arrangement for organ of two pieces by Felix
Mendelssohn to be played at my wedding.
Although I’d composed by hand for years, I decided to try out a
composition program called MusicTime for this project. Although it was a bit easier (and visually
tidier) than writing longhand, the program has many shortcomings, including a
flaw that allows anomalies in duration – that is, one could accidentally
include an extra 8th note that exceeds the number of beats allowed
in a measure, or have only two quarter notes in a ¾ measure, with no rest
inserted to account for the remaining beat.
Although MusicTime allows one to play back a MIDI file of one’s piece,
it’s hard to hear some of the errors.
Consequently, I had to print out a copy of the music and visually check
it for mistakes. I had a chance to do
this at my teaching job while some well-behaved high-school students were busy
with a worksheet. One of them, a
musician named Shane, saw what I was doing and we talked about music for a
while. He recommended a program called
Finale, and later gave me a copy. I
gave it a try and was delighted with it!
Gradually, I came to realize that I could use Finale as a tool in
creating multi-track recordings of my music.
I began
transcribing my pieces to Finale files, learning as I went. Although the MIDI sounds were rather cheesy,
especially in the strings and brass, it was a treat to hear my music at last –
a cleaner-sounding version of the trio, the quartet, “All In a Garden
Green.” I acquired a Yamaha DGX-300
keyboard with MIDI disk drive and a wide range of instrumental sounds, a
digital 4-track recorder and a plethora of other computer programs for
converting MP-3s to Wave files, mixing Wave files, burning CDs, etc. My brother Jordan was very helpful in this
stage of the process.
In February 2004 my “pen pal” Ewa (pronounced “Eva”), who lives in Poland and is multi-talented, needed an arrangement of a Polish folk tune for her dance troupe. I offered to help her out, and thus began work on a 3½-minute piece for orchestra called “The Light In a Stranger’s Eyes.” It took about four months to compose, with a lot of sending MIDI files back and forth over the Internet. When it was finished, I now had an excuse to create my first CD. After a lot of trial and error I managed to make a working electronic “recording,” or “realization” of the dance. I also did the same for the trio, the quartet and “All In a Garden Green,” which I'd already completely transcribed. They can all be found on my CD, with the un-original title of Original Compositions, realized by the Electronic Philharmonic, as I call my recording system. The CD includes a bonus track of one movement from the live recording of the trio and a short “dissertation” by Stefan on Renaissance dance rhythms. It’s also got extensive liner notes about the recording process and the individual pieces, as well as the original cover art I made for “All In a Garden Green.”
Here is an audio clip from my CD: The Light In a Stranger’s Eyes. It’s the shortest track on the album.
If you’d like to buy a copy of the CD ($10 USD),
simply contact me at ndollak@juno.com to
request it.
You can also order my new CD (same price), called Return of the Electronic Philharmonic! In June 2004 I finished transcribing the first movement of Lily’s piano concerto, and by Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 I had finished composing the other two movements. It took me precisely 15.25 years to complete that concerto. I think Brahms took about that long to write his first piano concerto, so I guess I’m in good company!
Also on the CD are, as promised, that early symphony and those three little waltzes. Although they are juvenilia (Op. 2 and 1, respectively), I did take some liberties as far as editing, harmony and orchestration go. Thus, my complete musical output so far is now available on these two CDs.
The new CD turned out very well, I think --– much better than the first in several respects. In fact, I’m now seriously considering doing the George Lucas thing with Original Compositions and creating an improved recording of the pieces. The string quartet needs a bit of editing, and the instruments are not all playing in the correct registers for their range. (I think that when I originally wrote the piece, I sketched it out on the piano and tried to have the various stringed instruments play the corresponding piano notes in the same octave. The result sounds more like an accordion than a string quartet, because the instruments are usually not playing in their “comfort zones” and are too close together in register.) I hope to unlock Finale’s secret for getting the MIDI playback to alternate between arco and pizzicato on cue (It can be done; I just haven’t gotten the hang of it yet), which will cut recording time in half and get rid of some synchronization problems that plague the original recording. Finally, I discovered a mixing technique while recording the second CD that improves the recording level, so the levels should be a bit more uniform on the new version of the first CD. (For those who are wondering what I’m talking about, the first CD came out very quiet. One has to crank the volume way up to hear it. Then, on track 5, we hear the sample from the live recording of the trio, and it’s really loud! One turns down the volume, and ends up missing the beginning of the string quartet because it gets too soft again. Then one is deafened again by track 14 –-- another live recording. One has to turn the volume up even higher for track 15. Although there are some imbalances in the recording level between the three pieces on the second CD, they are all high enough that the volume knob may be set to a medium setting and left there.)
And then on to new things! Creating The Light In a Stranger’s Eyes
entirely in Finale, with only a few ideas jotted down on paper, was a wonderful
learning experience for me, as was completing Lily’s piano concerto and re-working that early symphony. The
program allows me to work very quickly and hear the instruments all playing
together, so there’s far less guesswork. If something doesn’t turn out
right, I can fix it right away; on paper, it’s sometimes anyone’s guess as to
what that wrong note was supposed to be. I can experiment with different
combinations of instruments and try different registers for more colorful
effects. Hopefully, this has prepared me for my next musical project: a
symphony about flight. This will be scored for a rather large orchestra
augmented with lots of percussion, tubular bells, harpsichord, piano and
organ. Its various movements will illustrate Wan Hu (a Chinese official
of the 1500s who blew himself to bits in an attempt to fly to the Moon), the
Montgolfier brothers’ balloon, the Wright brothers’ airplane, the exploits of
the Red Baron, Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier and Jeanne Yeager’s
flying Voyager nonstop around the world without refueling in 1986.
The final movement will be inspired by the poem “High Flight,” by John
Gillespie Magee, Jr.