In Which Ryan Continues To Chew The Elephant
April 2023 | 4:4
Goomba and Koopa would like to remind you that proper posture is very important.
What's Been Happening
As anticipated, this month has been crammed full with writing, playing, teaching, and just generally making a nuisance of myself regarding sounds. At last check I’m about 37% through the elephant, so while it’s nice to take a break to type this sentence it’s not the time of year with lots of tangible updates… so I should probably get back to chewing.
May your masks smell pleasant and your packages arrive without incident,
Ryan
Chart O' The Month
This is a chart I wrote while in grad school, originally to feature my good friend and fellow composer Chris Clark with big band and later for the Medium Ensemble to feature another good friend and composer Mike Pinto on guitar.
Musically, there’s two main elements that I liked and used to create the tune. First is the use of extended pedal point in the bass that finally gives way to harmonic motion at the peak of the chart. The effect is really cool and something I overtly stole from Duke Ellington’s “Reflections in D” but I like it a lot and think it’s effective here as well. The second is that the tenor melody is the featured voice, but the answering improvisation in guitar is really the musical driving force of the tune until it finally takes over (hence the title). How these two elements combined is what I really like about the tune and has made it one I come back to pretty frequently when I’m putting together set lists.
Look, Nature!
Despite the busy schedule, we got to take a quick trip out to Volo bog and hung out with these two sandhill cranes. Worth noting that I correctly identified them as not dendrobium.
Education Notes
As we in the music education community are planning our summer and fall seasons, I was asked this weekend what the most important thing was to maintaining a successful plan. There’s lots of viable answers, but I think the most overlooked and simple one is probably this:
Avoid foreseeable errors.
More explanation would actually be counterproductive in this case. That said, the more I reference this as I’m planning, the more likely I’m improving what I’m working on.