I'm writing a piano concerto. This is the piano section of the second movement.

2nd Movement (Piano)

This project began during the long New England winter, which gave me time to reflect and express my thoughts on empirical valuation.  I created program notes for La Chasse, which can be downloaded here:  http://bit.ly/1h8prv6

La Chasse

Remember

Remember (Night Drive Remix)

Buffer Music

It is important for me to be able to record my life experiences, but I have a hard time consistently writing in a journal.  Rather than keep a log of my day-to-day experiences, I think emotions are more easily communicable, especially through an artistic medium.  This is the motivation for my music journal.

My music journal is like a regular journal in almost every respect.  It is meant to record my feelings in a moment, help me practice my impromptu writing skills, take gratuitous amounts of time, show my weaknesses, contemplate relationships, tell stories...  in short, a journal should provide sufficient output volume to capture an individual in time.
I established a few rules so this would indeed be a journal and not a sloppy album.  First, an entry may only allow minimal planning - the song should be mostly impromptu.  Special entries may take more time than others, but the golden standard is to record in one take, and edit in the spare time of that same day.  I may not use other materials, not even my own - it must be an original reflection.  I allowed minimal extra-piano embellishments, but these are kept to a minimum.

This collection spans my second semester at Harvard, from January to April.  I'll make them downloadable, and of course I'll give details for each song.  I sincerely hope you enjoy!  Feedback is certainly welcome.

Patrick


Heavy Snow

Journal: Spring 2012

It is important for me to be able to record my life experiences, but I have a hard time consistently writing in a journal.  Rather than keep a log of my day-to-day experiences, I think emotions are more easily communicable, especially through an artistic medium.  This is the motivation for my music journal.

My music journal is like a regular journal in almost every respect.  It is meant to record my feelings in a moment, help me practice my impromptu writing skills, take gratuitous amounts of time, show my weaknesses, contemplate relationships, tell stories...  in short, a journal should provide sufficient output volume to capture an individual in time.

I established a few rules so this would indeed be a journal and not just a sloppy album.  First, an entry may only allow minimal planning - the song should be mostly impromptu.  Special entries may take more time than others, but the golden standard is to record in one take, and edit in the spare time of that same day.  I may not use other materials, not even my own - it must be an original reflection.  I allowed minimal extra-piano embellishments, but these are kept to a minimum.

A final note about mixing.  This collection may sound biased soft.  This is a natural difficulty when recording piano music, and I've tried my best to correct it.  You may still need to turn it up.  The album is also mixed to have contrasting soft and loud portions in most songs.  (Surprising for an instrument named "soft-loud"...)  This is intentionally so because I want them to be listened to, not just tolerated as background music.  That's how I see them, anyway.

This collection spans my second semester at Harvard, from January to April.  I'll make them downloadable, and of course I'll give details for each song.  I sincerely hope you enjoy!  I would love your feedback.

Patrick

_______________________

January 11:  Wandering

Wandering is my first attempt at my music journal, and it set the tone for my journal: no preparation at all was taken, and this almost no editing was done.  For me, the song evokes a wind-swept walk with swirling leaves.  (Such was our aberrant January in Boston.)  This song is an analog to The Lotus, the first track on my upcoming album, Education in Zion.  That is, the two share a progressive and meandering sound, with heavy jazz and classical influences.  The song is a reflection on my own life experiences, unlike perhaps all the remaining tracks.  I hope you like this one, its status as the first finished product from this new recording era is a particular treat.


January 13:  The Promotion

This song is meant to be the first of several in a series.  The Promotion is about an average man, perhaps 30 years old, who works as an administrative assistant for an emerging software company in the early 1980s.  Having worked hard as a paid intern for the company, he was called in at the end of an unsuspecting Friday.  Dreading perhaps that they would let him go, he finds to his delight that he is promoted to official staff.  After a happy conversation and warm handshake, he leaves the office to a beautiful sunset view and a bright future, and he reflects on the fruit of his hard work.  The chord progressions and heavy syncopation are similar to commercial jingles I remember from my youth.


January 15:  The Belfry

This song is about an early Christian monastery in eastern Europe.  A foreign Catholic official supplants the local leader, and the town bellman must learn to meet ends with him.  The incoming master is diffident and strange, and the two do not get along as they perform their daily chores and hold service.  The tension between the two is complex, like all human relationships, and the song explores that interplay.  It is finally revealed that the master is a Visigoth spy, sent to flag invaders for their conquest.  As the Visigoth army pours into the small town, the old bellman climbs the top stairs to ring the bell, typically tolling only for church or funeral services.  The people panic, some grab farming tools to defend themselves, some run for their lives.  In the end, no natives are left, and the conquest is complete.  The bellman waits in his tower for his fate - an unmarked soldier comes up to the belfry and stabs the man, who then plunges to his death.  I wrote this song for no particular purpose, it simply interested me.


January 18:  Now You Know

This song was written for a very specific purpose. A very dear friend of mine, beginning with my birthday 2011, exchanged some very important emails with me, and we were able to clear the air regarding things I have longed to know for many many years.  The feelings her stories evoked are beyond my ability to express, so I wrote a song to do just that.  I will always be very grateful to have such a wonderful friend.


February 2:  Eager Flight

This song was written as I prepared for midterms - my anxiety certainly makes itself here!  Key, time signature, and volume are all permuted with almost no order.  Retrospectively, the song evokes for me the imagery of a young man with rocket boosters on his feet.  His technology is genius, but his flight is awkward and dangerous.  At times he crashes into bushes or hits birds, but this does not detract him from learning quickly how to master his new invention.  The imagery I see in this song is in part owed to Mercury from Gustav Holst's Planets.


February 12:  Lavender

Here in Boston, I planned for a few weeks to have a meaningful date with a girl in my ward.  She loves music, and I love food, and we both make it our artistic business to prepare just those things.  So, in exchange for her culinary creativity, I would play for her my best creations.  This was such an exciting event, I would a song merely in anticipation for it!  Lavender is more than a song, it was accompanied by a poem and selected picture.  I sent the song to her before the selected evening, and she responded in kind by making a lavender pound cake as a gift.  It was a beautiful evening, and I am happy to reflect on it.  This song is meant to inspire imagery of a strong orange sunset over lavender fields.  Sans interpretation, the poem follows:

a part of me hopes
the fields roll on forever
nothing to veil
all of me hopes that

of course, this is not home
no hands to shake
or raise
not very good

oh, but still I am drawn to it!
God's intimate collection
the sweet perfume
the soft eyes


March 1:  Forest Spirits

This song is a reflection of a childhood identity of mine, Chrono Trigger.  The theme and embellishments are loosely based on those developed by Yasunori Mitsuda.  This is the first song in which I used non-piano elements:  soft pizzicato strings are audible beginning at :20, a warm synth pad at :35, glocken at 2:14, and a lone church bell at 4:07.


March 2:  Superman

This semester, my cohort member and dear friend encountered a difficulty in her relationship with her fiancee, who needed to temporarily move to California.  They are very much in love, and I have seen how difficult this has been for her.  I wrote this song to depict my understanding of her longing, and encourage hope for the near future when they will be together again.  The song is also designed to literally evoke the strange and perfect Superman, suspended above the clouds.  Superman may also be taken to represent Jesus Christ, a perfect Man full of empathy and hope.


March 5:  Daydream

This song means little to me - it just occurred.  The song represents a child's first romantic interest.


March 11:  Jumping

This song was written over Spring break, which had beautiful weather and little responsibility.  I had a great time!  My thoughts turned to a girl I dated rather intently in 2011.  She was now deciding if she was going to take accept a work offer here in Boston, a city she has always dreamed of, and yet now does not seem so sure.  The title makes reference to one of her favorite poems, The Door, by E.B. White.  However, contrasting the anxiety-riddled confusion presented there, Jumping is meant to convey true choice and clarity in the midst of multiple futures.  She has since made her decision, and it's a very happy one.


March 16:  Fate River

A personal favorite here!  It is difficult to explain this song's complexity here.  Shortly said, the song loops back on itself, playing both forwards and backwards at times, possible because of symmetries in chord structures.  The song represents quantum space, the impossibly complex land of the infinitesimal.  That is, our current understanding of physics predicts that when viewing the fabric of time-space at very small levels, particles jump in and out of existence, travel short distances through time, exist many places at once...  complete mayhem.  This untenable world makes understanding the origins of the big bang near impossible, and the advance of science difficult.  This song is meant to capture that small and wild world.  One can also think of a river as we understand it, using its majesty and caprice as a metaphor for the former interpretation.


March 27:  The Deadline

This is the second installment of the working man series.  Little more needs explaining here - like all great events in life, reality eventually normalizes great joys and sorrows.  Here, the man is well-ensconced in his new job, and this song represents the frustration of working long and strange hours to meet corporate deadlines.  The song parallels my own frustration during two very hard weeks in school.


April 15:  Sanguine

Even if the listener never detects it, Sanguine is a very strange song, written like no other.  For starters, I wrote it with my eyes closed.  I felt very dizzy and crazy as I did so, and this song is only the first 9 minutes of an hour-long recording.  I felt like my blood was warm, and I was going to simultaneously cry and laugh, perhaps indefinitely.  I really wish I understood my body sometimes, but I was taken for a ride this night.  I woke up the next day feeling great, as if nothing happened.  It is named Sanguine to represent the classic Humor of Spring, a loving and happy mood, traditionally explained as the surplus of blood.


April 17:  Metal Rain

This song was written in my mind as I walked to school one day.  The composition has three parts: pulses, melody clusters with high reverb, and its corresponding reversal.  They are strung together in long bursts, meant to be an ambient piece.  I must give credit to my heavy influences, Steve Reich and Jon Hopkins.  The title is meant to be as abstract as the sounds, but the name is also allegory for the aftertaste of iron-rich tap water.


April 18:  The Fire

This song was written to help me express a specific event.  I have spent a lot of time this last month with a member of my singles ward.  However, deciding to date or not has been difficult for me.  This song represents a couple who have distanced themselves from their friends at a beach fire to have an important talk about their storied relationship.  That imagery is similar to my own feelings only in the sense of evoking ambiguity.


April 22:  Heavy Snow

This song is also a first: it was written, played, and edited within an hour, entirely in the presence of a witness.  Three sources confirm that this song has a familiar vibe, and I predict this is due to its simplicity.  I really like this one, it sounds like a winter piece, very simple and beautiful.

I almost threw it away because it felt trite, but I'm glad I didn't.  This song doesn't seem to wrap up my Spring Journal well, but that's how journals are, isn't it?  They begin and end like all segments of life - suddenly, unexpectedly.


Jumping

I have been working on this song off and on as I studied for my 2nd semester finals.  It's been a very long semester, and I'm glad to have it behind me.

Demonstrated here, my ensemble music is very different from my piano work.  I prefer an eclectic combination of electronics, orchestration, jazz, and rock.  This song prominently features Michael Nyman's Gattaca soundtrack ("The One Moment").  Other samples are taken from Portishead, Dream Theater, and Dee Daniels.

The title makes reference to the ill-tempered humor, as an analog to Sanguine in my Spring Journal.  The suffix also alludes to one of my favorite prints, Albrecht Durer's Melencolia I, another artistic expression on the humors.  The image is a detail from that work - a magic square, like the confounded mathland I've been in.  My song is similar in style as well: deliberate, heterogenous, organic.

I sincerely hope you enjoy!  Feedback is always very welcome.



Choleria

This is written for a dear friend, who has taken me under her wing since I arrived in Boston.  She is incredibly kind, even when things are not exactly easy for her.  This song depicts what I believe to be her internal motivation and source of comfort: waiting on the Lord.  

The first two minutes are a stream of consciousness, to match her own.  Variegated, positive, earthly.  Half way through, I try to convey trouble, and her source of relief.  Calming, constant, and sometimes almost out of reach...  The oscillating reverb never fully satisfies, yet seems to suggest that inimitable Other.  I hope my audience can hear the duality, and enjoy the sum many times.

Wait on Him

Mostly based on piano, with some acoustic and electronic touches. Olivier Messiaen meets Yoko Kanno.

PatrickStaples