Chris Rutkowski, Composer

Classic Tom and Jerry (from Japanese YouTube!)
Check out Tom’s awesome performance of the Liszt! No digital anything, just pure hard work and artistry on the part of musicians and animators.

I found this on Alex Ross’s blog, and, well, how could anyone resist the power of this statement. It’s a real commercially-released record cover of Adrian Boult’s recording of The Planets in the 1970’s. Here’s a link to the blog, which has a bigger picture. And here’s a link to the site where the cover is one of a huge collection of “The Greatest Classical CD Covers Ever!”. A Must See!

Kit Armstrong is apparently no secret, having been on Letterman, NPR, and written up in major publications. But this is my first experience of him. Rather than add any more verbiage, here are two videos, both taken when he was……8. One quick point-he’s also a serious composer.

First the flash (Liszt: La Leggierezza):

Now the poetry (Chopin: Berceuse):

Here is lot of info from an NPR interview, and at his website.

Earlham College students produced some very fine computer music projects using Reason and ProTools in a variety of styles (and media).

Here are a few audio and video examples:

Spoken Word, Musique Concrete
Dan Mahle: JFK-Cuban Missile Crisis
Alex Arnold: Kerouac

Pop Electronica
Alex Arnold: Over and Over

Video
Dan Mahle: Earlham College Wilderness Programs promotional video.
See previous post for more info.

The Apple web site features this article on a public school music teacher who uses the consumer-level apps that come with a mac to record her students, edit the audio, and post to her website for her students to download to their iPods. She also uses Finale’s Smart Music to create exercises for the applied instrument studies. The app analyzes the student’s performance and reports rhythm and intonation mistakes and allows the student to interactively, without the teacher’s presence.

This is a terrific use of tech and indicative of the new job description I have posted about often. Here’s a website that I wrote for a music teacher that takes advantage of many possibilities of the medium, such as archiving teaching materials that students can download, updatable teaching schedules, audio examples of the teacher’s performances, and information for prospective students.

Here is a link to an exciting new direction in computer music at Earlham College. It’s a promotional video, featured on the College website, for the Wilderness Programs (one of the many incredibly creative options at this gem of a school) made by music student Peter Wiggington and Peace and Global Studies major Dan Mahle. Dan has been working in the computer music studio on a number of projects, including two video/music collaborations with Peter. It’s interesting that Peter, the music major, is the videographer, and Dan (the PAGS major) is the composer. To me, this just emphasizes the convergence of disciplines and technologies that has driven my embrace of artist-driven technology.

Here are comments by Dan:

For this video/film project Peter and I used 3 of my songs: the lead-in song is entitled “The Next Generation,” a song that I wrote using Garageband with my good friend Ian Shaw back in the Summer of 2006 as part of our rap group “IDeology.” The second song is called “Gonna be Alright,” also an IDeology piece, and also written in Garageband, with Ian on the piano; this song was completed in the Summer of 2005. The next song, unfortunately, is not one of mine. It is a short clip from a professional (royalty free) song that Peter found and wanted to keep for that small section of the film. The final piece of mine that is used in the film is an untitled piece that I had written only days before the project was completed. I wrote it as a part of my Independent Study in the Earlham music studio with Chris Rutkowski using Reason 3 software. Peter liked it so much that we decided to use it despite the fact that it wasn’t actually a finished work.
Peter and I tried to manipulate and edit the music so as to fit seamlessly with the film. We went through several stages of editing, working in the latest version of Garageband - still the easiest and most efficient program to work with for simple projects, I think. I think the finished product turned out pretty well, despite our limited experience in doing such projects. My music has been featured in numerous other student projects over the years but this was the first time that I was actually involved in the editing process. I’m looking forward to doing more of it!

Questions and comments for Dan can be posted in the Comments section, and he will be able to respond.

I’ve posted several times about the extention of computer music into the video realm (my favorite, the multi-media work of Takagi Masakatsu), and because of the incredible power of consumer-level computers and commercially available video software, filmscoring is now a quite viable option for small university programs.

With this post, a new category is introduced in the blog that more closely reflects my technological life. For many reasons, including the tremendous power of consumer level computers and the convergence of previously distinct applications, we have reached a point where geeky code crunching has created programs with nearly infinite possibilites, which are available to all. Now, more than ever, is there a need for artists, who deal with the infinite as the workspace of their creativity, to make sense out of these possibilities and shape them into meaningful content. This is the essential theme of my tech blogging.

The New York Times Art & Entertainment section provides yet another example of this nexus in a story about the computer effects artists on Robert Zemekis’ new film Beowulf. There are many points that echo those I’ve written about here:

1. The need to humanize the new tech. Stravinsky once said he needed limitations in order to write a piece, thus the remarkable bassoon passage that opens the Rite of Spring is only possible because of the hundreds of years that went into the creation of the instrument and its literature, and Stravinsky’s insistence on extending the range into the extreme upper register, resulting in the unique timbral qualities of playing so high above the fundamental. (It has often been remarked that he could have used an English Horn, where the notes would have fallen comfortably in the standard register, but the tension would have been completely lost.) This sentiment is echoed by the Beowulf computer artists’ feeling of having the envelope pushed into radically new territory by the dramatic needs of the director.

2. The boundaries are being pushed for artistic reasons, not technological ones. And success is likewise evaluated by same. Put another way, the human and historical limitations are necessary in order to solve the problem posed by facing an infinite number of possibilities. How so? In the same way that a language can’t be invented, but requires a community of thinkers to organically agree what words mean (Wittgenstein). Limitations edit and focus the artist, thus taking the work outside of the individual into the world.

Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations: in a perfect world, “there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

3. Although not overtly related to my comments (here, here, and here) about the expansion of computer music into the video area, there’s a lot to be learned here by creators of smaller scale video/music composites in schools like Earlham.

Here’s a link to a Times video related to the story.

Here’s a picture of the computer music lab at the Indiana University School of Music. Note the large video monitor. It seems that video is becoming a common extension of the curriculum of the better electronic music programs. (Note also the two computer monitors-a virtual necessity with the complex interfaces of audio and video applications.)

At Earlham College, we currently have two computer music students involved in filmscore projects.

Here’s a “serious” contender for the perfect video to do a filmscore for in the Tyler studio.

American Troops training the Iraqi Army.

Maybe we can discuss the best musical approach-something from Swan Lake, perhaps?

Here’s a question: Which is your favorite “dancer”? The more you watch it, the more the formal balance of the piece is revealed. Some of the dudes have mastered the art of the jumping jack and are distributed throughout the line. There are various degrees of variation, from ornamentation to complete recomposition of the theme. My favorite is currently the guy third from the right who does an augmentation variation (eighth-notes seem to become half-notes) while completely changing the contour of the exercise. On the other hand the dude on the far right has a very creative pallet of free variations-the jazz musician in the group?-including a kind of M.C. Hammer shuffle.

Here’s another question: Yeah, it’s hilarious, but is it funny or tragic-or both.