After a brief period of time in limbo, my website has returned with a fresh coat of totally rad. I was trying to clean it up and make it look more professional, but I just can’t get over how fantastic it is. I mean, look at that red thing on the left. What the hell is it supposed to be, anyway? I don’t care, it looks slick either way.
For years, I’ve written my website myself in metapad, a simple text editor. It served me well enough, evolving as I learned how to do a few simple things like CSS and PHP includes, but it’s a bit frustrating to have to open and edit a text file, copying and pasting code around, every time I want to update. So I decided to finally go through with scrapping the whole thing and upgrading to Wordpress. I mainly wanted an administrator backend to make posts, but look at all the other cool stuff it does!
- Categories and tags for organization and searching.
- An interface for streaming music files.
- Easier embedding of video and flash. Check out Wotan’s Throne and a new piece, Fulcrum, if you don’t believe me.
- An RSS feed. I’d link you, but you should really click on that icon in the lower right. It changes color when you mouse over it! I still find that entertaining, and I have a college education.
You’ll notice I’ve removed most of my older pieces in a gross act of self-revisionism that would make Stalin blush. It’s also no longer possible to download MP3s of my music unless you know where to look.
Not everything is up yet, but the bits that matter are. The only downside is that I no longer have an excuse to put off actually writing music.
| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
~1:47 |
| Size |
1.75 MB |
One of the most frustrating aspects of video game music is its repetitive nature. Players must typically spend an extended amount of time in one area of the game before moving on, and each area has traditionally contained a single track that loops continuously. Listening to the same music over and over becomes irritating, especially if the player fails at the task necessary to continue and is further delayed in unlocking a new level and its music.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
2:12 |
| Size |
3.03 MB |
For this project, I selected a segment of video from a BBC documentary called Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, stripped the audio, and composed my own. It depicted sea turtles eating algae underwater, then swimming on the surface; by the end, it had zoomed out to an aerial view of the archipelago. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rights to distribute the video, but here’s the music to it.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
2:59 |
| Size |
4.11 MB |
Good texts for art songs are difficult to find. I was playing around with some Percy Shelley poems, but then, as I was looking through Brandon Bird’s website, I found the Letters to Walken. “An Acquaintance?” Year 2 caught my eye, and the rest, as they say, is awesome.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
1:26 |
| Size |
1.97 MB |
| Book IV (1-9)
Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae;
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore.
|
I traverse the distant haunts of the Pierides, never trodden before by the foot of man. ‘Tis my joy to approach those untasted springs and drink my fill, ’tis my joy to pluck new flowers and gather a glorious coronal for my head from spots whence before the muses have never wreathed the forehead of any man. First because I teach about great things, and hasten to free the mind from the close bondage of superstition, then because on a dark theme I trace verses so full of light, touching all with the muses’ charm.
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| Year |
2009 |
| Time |
1:06 |
| Size |
4.61 MB |
This was a project for my Electronic Music course. We were required to write a soundtrack for any of several provided videos in the public domain. I selected footage of someone’s vacation to the Grand Canyon. The music consists of polychords and extended tertian chords in piano and strings, a solo cello, a subtle synth, and my voice, all slathered in reverb and/or delay. The sounds come from a Kurzweil K2000. The video? Who knows.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Time |
3:01 |
| Size |
4.16 MB |
| Book III (830-831, 838-842)
Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,
quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur. [...]
sic, ubi non erimus, cum corporis atque animai
discidium fuerit quibus e sumus uniter apti,
scilicet haud nobis quicquam, qui non erimus tum,
accidere omnino poterit sensumque movere,
non si terra mari miscebitur et mare caelo.
|
Death, then, is nothing to us, nor does it concern us in the least, inasmuch as the nature of the mind is but a mortal possession. [...] So, when we shall be no more, when there shall have come the parting of body and soul, by whose union we are made one, you may know that nothing at all will be able to happen to us, who then will be no more, or stir our feeling; no, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea with sky.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Time |
1:55 |
| Size |
2.65 MB |
| Book II (55-61)
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis
in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus
interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam
quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura.
hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
|
For even as children tremble and fear everything in blinding darkness, so we sometimes dread in the light things that are no more to be feared than what children shudder at in the dark, and imagine will come to pass. This terror of the mind then, this darkness, must needs be scattered not by the rays of the sun and the gleaming shafts of day, but by the outer view and the inner law of nature.
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| Year |
2008 |
| Time |
3:12 |
| Size |
4.40 MB |
| Book I (62-63, 66-67, 72-75, 78-79)
Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
in terris oppressa gravi sub religione [...]
primum Graius homo mortalis tollere contra
est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra [...]
ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque,
unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri, [...]
quare religio pedibus subiecta vicissim
obteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.
|
When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of superstition, [...] ’twas a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her [...]. And so it was that the lively force of his mind won its way, and he passed beyond the fiery walls of the world, and in mind and spirit traversed the boundless whole; whence in victory he brings us tidings what can come to be and what cannot [...]. And so superstition in revenge is cast beneath men’s feet and trampled, and victory raises us to heaven.
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De Rerum Natura is an epic poem written by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 BCE). We know little about Lucretius’s life beyond the fact that he was an adherent of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had lived two centuries before him. The poem, written for and dedicated to Lucretius’s friend Gaius Memmius, sets forth and expounds upon many of the ideas of Epicureanism – that the universe is governed by the motion of atoms, that we must conquer fear (particularly that of death), and that humanity must achieve its own salvation rather than petitioning it from the gods.
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