Last Friday I finished writing my first large work for orchestra, entitled Pluto. Those of you familiar with both the ongoing debate as to Pluto’s planet-hood (fyi, it’s not) and “The Planets”, an orchestral suite by Gustav Holst, may get what this piece’s title is getting at.
Although the truth is I didn’t compose the piece with Holst in mind. In fact, I had a hard time titling this piece because it changes feel so many times. I think the piece is best described as being heavily thematic, following the somewhat-recent trend of Hollywood film music to use a lietmotif, or “recurring theme” which holds the piece together. Overall, the piece has heavy influences of film composers John Williams and John Powell, 20th-century American composers such as Aaron Copland, and touches of Jazz.
The main theme is comprised of the notes C, F, G or scale degrees 1, 4, and 5 (1C 2d 3e 4F 5G) played in ascending order. Originally the theme is presented in a major key. In the middle of the piece, the theme is presented in a minor key. The piece finishes in a major key.
Tonight I’ve been hard at work on a new music page. The new site utilizes two really cool javascript libraries which are brand spankin’ new.
One is called SoundManger (which has just released a much anticipated version 2), and the other is called Smartlook (from the guys over at ISSUU).
SoundManager is a javascript library which makes playing sounds on a web page really easy. I used it on my new site to turn a simple list of mp3 files into a cool-looking audio playlist.
Smartlook is a javascript library which works in conjunction with an ISSUU account. ISSUU is a great site for publishing your documents (.pdf,.doc,.xls,.ppt,etc.) online. It features a really clean flash player and uses top-notch document conversion tools. Smartlook is their newest service. After generating a key based on your ISSUU account id (you can do this by logging into ISSUU and going here) and including the smartlook.js library in you website, all of your .pdfs, .docs, .ppts, and other supported documents that your website links to become links to the issuu flash document viewer for that document.
Basically, the code allows you to skip the step of having to upload your documents to ISSUU before you embed them in your page. Smartlook automatically uploads your documents to ISSUU using you account, and redirects all of your links to documents automatically. It’s pretty sweet. Check out how I used it to display pdfs of musical scores I published here.
