Saturday, July 18, 2015

Garbage Days of Winter 2014

I'm always on the lookout for easy ways to reuse and recycle musical material.  And recycling is something you do on garbage day, right?

It occurred to me that I could excerpt segments from my ongoing daily composition series called The Seasons.  I would assemble these into a shorter piece.  If I selected one segment per week the length would be reduced by about one seventh.

Mixed Meters' Three Regular Readers probably understand the previous paragraph.  If you don't, try getting up to speed by going to The Seasons page and reading and listening and reading and listening.   Good luck.  This project is now in its fourth year and I'm still finding it difficult to explain.

It was easy to decide which day of the week to use.  I've imbued many of The Seasons with a musical quality I call Garbage Day Periodicity.  GDP just means that I try to add some sort of (more or less) noticeable musical change on Mondays, the day I have to remember to take out the garbage.

I picked the season called Winter 2014.  It is based on an extremely early piano sonata of mine.  I deleted everything but the Monday segments.  There was a little work pacing these properly (by adjusting the time between them) and a lot of work mixing the musical elements so everything balanced nicely.  The actual music is completely unchanged.  Just remember that the 13 segments of this piece were never intended to be combined this way.

The result worked out pretty well, in my opinion.  There are lots of little surprises.  It is sort of a time-lapse version.  Maybe movie trailer is a better simile.  I think this gives an excellent idea of the content of the longer versions but still reserving plenty of surprises for the full experience.

Click here to hear Garbage Days of Winter 2014 by David Ocker - © 2015 by David Ocker, 120 seconds


If you're curious about the other versions, here are the links:

Winter 2014   (4232 sec.)   [listen]    [read]

Life Time (Winter 2014, short version)   (814 sec.)   [listen]    [read]

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Dear David,

I am a young marine biologist and self-taught musician from Mexico. I met Leslie last week at the latin american polychaete symposium, Monterrey. I am very happy that she talked about you to me, which left me amazed. I gave a copy of my music to her. I hope you like it.

Best wishes to you and Leslie, and with much respect to your work,

Fernando Ruiz