In Which Ryan Knows A Thing
February 2023 | 4:2
Koopa and Goomba are pleased to inform you it is officially couch snuggles season. Also, that it is always couch snuggles season.
What's Been Happening
January has been another busy month with quite a bit of travel, including my first in-person JEN conference since before the pandemic and my wife taking an extended work trip to Palau (no pictures yet but I’m sure they’re forthcoming). DCI has started in earnest with callback auditions being finalized, and I’ve put pen to paper for a bevy of spring projects from charts for my virtual small group and the Medium Ensemble through drum corps and marching band.
In the random category, I’m also far too proud that I got picked as a listener email that got read (41:15) on the “Stuff You Missed In History Class” podcast! Apologies to anyone who thinks I didn’t need any positive reinforcement for my bullet point-laden profusions, but those people probably aren’t reading this paragraph anyways. I’ve even remembered to occasionally stop and take breaks (not including kitty tummy skritches, which I’m pretty sure are included in the agreement where the cats let us stay in their apartment).
All this to say; I hope you’re as busy as you want to be too, and if you could remind me in a couple weeks when I’m stressing out that this was all my idea in the first place I’d appreciate it.
May your masks smell pleasant and your packages arrive without incident,
Ryan
Chart O' The Month
This month saw the 15th anniversary of creating the Medium Ensemble, and this chart is labeled number 1 in the book plus was the closing tune of the gig almost every night when we played at both McDunna’s and the Gallery Cabaret so it seemed appropriate for this space.
The band was started because I was planning on doing a recital for my masters at DePaul and wanted to do a 12 piece ensemble, at least partly in homage to the Bop Stop Jazz Unit based in Northeast Ohio which was such a formative part of my aural lineage. Instead of calling rehearsals (which can be tedious), I decided to try and book gigs (which are less tedious if I ever stop talking) where we’d play a couple sets and then read through the more intricate recital charts at the end of the night when any patrons were probably going to have hazy memories of anything we messed up. I’m me, so I made a list of 10 likely venues along with a business plan and went to the first one on my list on a Friday evening. Halfway through my pitch the manager said “can you start this Tuesday” so I went outside, called three of the main players I wanted, then went back inside and said sure. This gave me three days (not including homework, calling the rest of the band, work, and class) to write three sets worth of music, so this was probably also the birth of the “Ryan can write charts quickly if he needs to” concept.
This chart was the first one I did because I already had the whole thing transcribed and arranged for big band so I could do a lot of copy and paste, but also because I love the chart and thought it would be a great way to end the night while featuring everyone in the band. I transcribed the original piece while I was living in Japan, then orchestrated it for big band for one of my last concerts in undergrad at Akron, then the original version for the Medium, and finally this recorded version I did for a concert at Niles West High School playing my Latin charts, so this tune has been with me along a lot of stops in my life.
One last note; I’ve always said that this song was written and used by Tito Puente when he was running the house band at Machito’s… but I can’t seem to figure out where in the world I got that info, or confirm it in any way. So if you happen to know anything about this tune (Michael Phillip Mossman I’m looking at you since it almost sounds like you did the orchestration on the original) please let me know.
Click on the link below for more information!
Look, Nature!
This is a picture my wife took at the botanic garden of a clematis, also apparently known as "the vagabond", and it is purple.
This concludes the information I know about this pretty flower.
Education Notes
My current “random smart things” book I’m reading right now is a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci that I got for Christmas. It’s interesting in lots of ways but two specific things have stuck out so far.
First, while Leonardo was a genius in any sense of the word, something that makes him so fascinating was that his genius lies not only in his capacity or innate talent for things, but in his pursuit of those talents. In order words, he probably had more actual ability than you or I at a lot of things, but it’s his methods and choices to pursue those avenues that made him historically great and that makes him more accessible to the average modern human.
Second and related to this, he’s famous for being interested in and great at many things, which ties him neatly to the modern educational excitement for being interdisciplinary. What separates him from my experience with a lot of modern approaches to combining disparate fields for greater educational impact is the depth to which he would pursue these ideas. He could have simply realized that geometry and the vanishing point relate to painting with perspective and been done with it, but instead he kept observing to the point of realizing what different shades of colors happen in shadows at different distances and times of day, and how the light from these shadows enters the eye in different ways, and how the optic nerve probably processes these in both a flat painting and a real vision. TL;DR - making connections and doing interdisciplinary studies is great, but exploring and trying to understand all the connected ideas of many subjects has greater value than unique and unexpected crossovers.