I'm finally free, and blog posts are back now!
I finally managed to get a scene recorded! It's not Scene 0, as much as I have been harping on about it all semester, but I felt like I was overthinking on Scene 0 and ultimately took to working on another scene to present for my senior recital. Here is a piano reduction of it, with the soprano part sung by the wonderful Niki Simerly. (P.S: check out her work!) I swear I'll update the Compositions page soon with this and other links.
I will not sugarcoat it: I was disappointed with this piece, once I stopped and took a look at what exactly I was doing. It's insufficient to express the feelings of Atlant at this point in the opera: he is being shipped away to a place he doesn't know, perhaps facing an eternity in a museum, and then I listen to the recording and... it sounds like the Baroque definition of sad. I'm now getting used to revising my ideas over and over again- perhaps I could use some of the melodic passages in a vastly different musical context, or even just use sparse and unnerving sound design in place of instruments for this scene. But for now, I'll leave the opera project be, and come back to it when I'm less tired from the semester's work.
I finally managed to finish the paper after multiple late nights and many consultations. I didn't get everything that I wanted to put into the paper, but what else is there to do when the deadline is right before the holidays? Anyhow, it ended up mainly being about how text-music relations are explored in different ways by Dufay and Binchois, with a side of problems about text underlay. And much (gentle) ragging on Leeman Perkins... not to speak ill of the dead, but every time I read the 'Text' part of the Mellon Chansonnier commentary volume, I find my blood pressure spiking dangerously high. Composers did consider text-setting in other ways than text-painting, God damn it...
Well, it's the holiday season. Allow me to do a little bit of shilling on behalf of two performing groups I'm indebted to in different ways, arranged in no particular order: Blue Heron has released a Christmas album including Advent and Christmas compositions from Dufay/Binchois/Ockeghem/Obrecht/Regis/Grenon and others, and Trinity Church has also released a Christmas album, with contemporary takes on older texts and tunes from Boykin/Powell/French/Cavagnaro/Whitbourn (rest in peace...)/Halley and a lot more. I will say that I regard the Ward Swingle arrangement of Gaudete with nothing less than burning hatred, but other than that all the pieces are fantastic.