David McMullin

Once in a while I remember bluesky, and I just caught up on your posts about Minneapolis. My God. Praying for strength for you and for all of us. May we all be able to do what you are doing there—Or may you defeat them so conclusively there that we don’t we have to.

I remember knowing people who were born before 1900. Tell a young person today that you met someone from the 19th century and it sounds like a sci-fi time-travel story. But they weren’t that rare when I was a kid in the 70s.

I much prefer just to keep them coming, however slowly, and hope once in a while one works. But this one makes it hard to maintain that attitude.

It’s just an idea I had that happens to be an impractically large undertaking. For many years I didn’t do it for that reason, then I decided to do it anyway. Still, it’s just my next piece.

It’s hard to talk about this without it sounding like this is supposed to be the summation of my life’s work, my masterpiece. I adamantly resist that.

True. In my case, I carried the idea for this piece around for 20-25 years before I finally decided to get started on it. The 5 1/2 years I mentioned is since then.

But I don’t like how working on one thing for so long puts all my creative eggs in the same basket. I’d hate to put all that time and effort into something that turns out to be one of my duds. (But that train of thought doesn’t lead anywhere helpful…)

I don’t feel like the slowness is a problem in itself, musically. When I think of art I love, how long it took someone to make it isn’t really a factor for me, just incidental information I usually don’t even know.

I’ve spent the last five and a half years on 20 minutes of music…

Actually there could be two less pedal changes that way, because the D-sharp could stay as E-flat. But unless you stop it with the left hand, that string would probably buzz when you shift to E-sharp in the next beat.

Writing for harp takes a lot of puzzle solving.

Thanks—I remember Danielle from Twitter days

There could be one less pedal change if in the 2/4 bar I spelled the E-natural as F-flat (which was in the previous chord) and the F-natural as E-sharp. If that takes it from impossible to playable, I'll do it, but I'd rather not unless it really helps.

Four measures of music notation for harp, from an orchestral score in progress. There's a chord, one bar of rest (5/8 meter at quarter-note = 44), and then an arpeggiated phrase. As written, it requires 5 pedal changes in a pretty short amount of time.

Question for harp players:

At quarter-note = 44, how hard is it to make all the pedal changes in this passage?

Is there a way of notating it to make it easier? Or if not, if I have to leave out or change some notes, which ones are causing the most trouble?

Thank you!

#Harp #NewMusic

I used baseball on the radio as my “background music” when I used to work alone from home, because I couldn’t use music for that. The ambient sounds, chitchat and general pace and tempo are comforting—then something exciting happens, the tone changes and I perk up my ears to pay attention.

Massachusetts: can we have this? Do we?

I believe that 80% of all potential problems in new music are the composer's fault, and I work my ass off to fix those 80% before they end up in anyone's hands, but by god I'll hold my ground on that 20% and I've regretted every time I didn't.

I hadn’t changed much, the music hadn’t changed at all, and the later students were not better players than the earlier pros. The only thing that changed was the presumption of who was probably right.

A couple times I had the opportunity to have student musicians perform pieces I had written years earlier, when I was a student, that had been premiered by professionals. It amazed me how many things that had been impossible or wrong the first time were just done without question the second time.

Thanks Stan—as do you. (And you can sing and play too.)

It turns out there are people out there who dedicate their lives to developing the tremendous skills and sensitivity it takes to make beautiful music out of dots on paper. I don’t have the discipline to do what they do, so instead I make dots on paper for them.

(I’d assume most players would make the right choice if they just saw too many long notes tied together. But they also might think, “this composer’s an idiot who doesn’t understand how string instruments work,” and I don’t want that.)

Thanks—I write slurs in with care, but don’t usually mark up- vs down-bow, preferring to leave that to the performers. “Free bow” sounds good, especially if it’s fairly standard.

I like that, short and simple. Thanks!

Question for string players:

What’s the clearest, most efficient way to indicate to a string section that a long held note should be played as if continuously, changing bow direction as necessary, but as subtly as possible, without everyone rearticulating together?

And now I'm halfway through my sixth year of the outside world seeming like a massive threat - oh, because it is - and my world becoming very small as a result. #StillCoviding #FiveYearsOn

I like to remember stuff I missed to feel better about what I’m missing now. For example, there was a period where it seemed like Game of Thrones was all anyone talked about. I never got around to it, and now I don’t have to because it just vanished and no one ever mentions it now. That’s a win.

Right, it’s not passive in the grammatical sense, but a lot of what people object to as “passive” isn’t technically passive voice; this is another of the many ways to obfuscate who did what.

We’re all hanging in there—I hope you are as well.

“We belong to one another and at the heart of all our catastrophes is a crisis of love: of ourselves, of one another as ourselves and of the Divine.”

Many thanks to the one brave soul (it was @muz4now.com) who found my Bandcamp page and dropped some coins in the hat there! I don’t have a lot there yet, but what I do have is all name-your-price, i.e. free if you wish. So if you too are curious, help yourself:

davidmcmullin.bandcamp.com