Of (music theory) freaks and geeks

I wonder how much time I spend changing the colors and templates....
If I could do the same thing with paint colors in my house, I would.

I love this background. It's so Napoleon Dynamite or Freaks and Geeks (which K and I have been watching through Netflix lately). There's something about school drama-type shows that I love. Maybe it's because there are so many great opportunities for interesting characters and awkward teenager-type situations. Maybe that's why I read so many YA novels too. And write about YA stuff. Maybe I haven't really grown up yet....

On a different note: music. I spent some time today working through a passage of Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau (reflections dance on the water). There are so many reasons why I love this piece and why I love Debussy in general--especially his Preludes and Images for piano. He does these really interesting gestures and patterns involving minor 3rd relations and quartal harmonies. Each measure seems to have a deeper meaning: some secret of the universe embedded in melodic and chordal patterns. I really do think he was literally painting with music (he said that he was more of a painter than a musician, or would rather have been a painter but became a composer instead). Sometimes it helps me to think beyond (impressionist) music theory and look only at the pattern of black and white keys, or at the curve of a melodic line or gesture. It's hard to explain. It makes my head spin (with pleasure) just thinking about it (yeah, I'm a total nerd).

What's difficult about this piece are all the fast runs and arpeggios all over the keyboard. They aren't hard to play at a slow tempo once you know the pattern, but I imagine getting them up to speed will be pretty tough, especially with my intermediate-level technique. But if I ever do get them (which I consider to be more flowing, water-like gestures than precise, tempo-perfect runs) I think my technique will improve greatly. Definitely more fun than working on Czerny exercises.

Here's what I was working on:

Today I looked at the middle system--the notes that are way up in the stratosphere of the treble clef. Not so easy to read, although through playing flute I can tell right away what the notes are.










But in order to practice it, I re-wrote the passage down a few octaves so I could read the pattern easier: 

 Sorry--the picture quality isn't great. I added fingerings and also colored boxes around important notes in the pattern--notes that would help me remember variations in the pattern.

Suddenly, the pattern made more sense and I could actually play it at a slow tempo.

What's so cool about this pattern is that the middle notes stay pretty much the same in a set (in this re-written example, system-to-system) while the first note and the colored-box notes change, going down chromatically from F (F, F-flat, E-flat, D).

I think I could spend the rest of my life studying Debussy and still learn new things about his compositional technique.

Here's some more of my composition sketch from the other day. I added more to it, and was thinking that when/if I finish the piece I could show the process from beginning to end (notated and recorded).

Again, yucky picture quality.