Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

acappella

Thoughts Right Now

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Do you remember when i would just sit in my horrid little apartment sophomore year, just banging out as many posts as i had thoughts? Today i feel like that, only less horrid. I cleaned. I bought groceries. I took that pile of books to the used bookstore. I have every right in the world to sit and transcribe thoughts until sundown, at which point i’m going to a BYOB Mexican restaurant to drink margaritas on a work-night against my better judgment.

Anywho, allow me to digress to the though i came here to transcribe: I sometimes wonder what my co-workers do when they go home.

I mean, we see what i’m doing right now, and it’s not all that impressive, but it’s something. Some of them have children, so that pretty much explains what they’re up to. The rest? Some like sports, some go to gyms, some engage in serial home-repair. One creates terrific bead work that i’m going to make a website for sooner or later. Aside from her, though, rarely do i hear about anyone’s personal projects (aside from buying tickets, or getting in shape, or putting up gold-plated gutters).

Surely they must have projects – we are all comm people, after all – defined by our interest in devouring a enormous subset of all things, and governed by secret wishes to be star reporters or gossip rousers. Surely they must have a novel in draft form, or an article, or an experiment in social engineering. Something.

I try to ferret something out of them, but they are either entirely inscrutable or they really do just hang out and watch television every night. It’s hard for me to imagine it – being defined just by what i do during the day. It seems like a horrid fate.

We all know about my songwriting habit, and my blogging hobby, but in the last few weeks i’ve been working just as much on two others, one of which is arranging music. When you arrange a song, you have to listen to it many, many, many times. You have to listen for pitches and rhythms, tonality and feel. Sometimes you have to listen at half speed, or with a section looped indefinitely. You have to listen until your brain and fingers have absorbed the sound, and can recreate it in standard notation, however inefficient it seems at the time.

Before i ever knew about a cappella music or polyphony or even, hell, arranging, i used to arrange Tori Amos songs for guitar. I didn’t really understand what i was teaching myself at the time – i would just sit with the sheet music in my lap and slowly transcribe it into a single staff of guitar tab. Sometimes it was physically unplayable, but my software would still play it, allowing me to hear what six separate guitarists playing one string each could make of a Tori song.

At the time i barely could read music, let alone transcribe pitches and rhythms by ear. Over half a decade later I just listen to “Since U Been Gone” more than 200 times and somehow, after more than a dozen hours of magical effort, i have an arrangement.

When they return my question, volleying: well, what’s your hobby, that always sounds so insubstantial. And, right now, it is. But, by god, the TrebleMakers will perform it live at a cappella fest 2005 or lose their voices trying, and then it will be real and alive and in the air, and i’ll know just why i spent a whole week of my live living, breathing, and singing every element of that damn song.

As for my other hobby, you can have a hint: inebriated cinema. I dare not say any more, because i… erm… have to go and fix the broken thing that Gina just found.

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Elise actually had me convinced for a moment that i might be growing a tail, but after a few solid hours of slouching around reading Durkheim’s Suicide i’m starting to think that i’ve grown a tiny callous at the base of my spine to protect it from hard wooden chairs. Elise went on to point out that dinosaurs’ sometimes had “helper brains” located at the base of their tail to help communicate information to their brains in a more expedient fashion. This, she claimed, would mean the difference between “ouch, my tail seems to be on fire” and “mmm, do i smell cookies?”

Durkheim’s Suicide is a fascinating (and decidedly unmorbid) look at the Sociological phenomena that can be statistically correlated to the rate of suicide in late nineteenth century Europe. It works on the supposition that suicide can be view as an entirely unpsychologically motivated act — or at least that an individual’s reasons to commit such an act are entirely outweighed by the causal factors associated with their role in society as a person, worshipper, spouse, and so forth.

The remainder of this post will strive to address neither the topic of evolutionary adaptation nor the topic of one’s place in society can dictate behavior more than their personal intent. However, it is definitely about both. Sortof.

(If you don’t know me at all you probably should just skip down to the last post to avoid too much incoherent rambling).

As of two years ago today i had only completed three music courses on a collegiate level. None of them went towards improving my vocal skills. I was fully aware of that fact, and though i strove to improve both my volume and pitch on my own i had already begun to do the same through coursework. In 2001 i earned the ability to record in Drexel’s digital studio, and it was during the mixing of Relief that i became enamored with the idea of joining 8 To The Bar.

8 To The Bar is Drexel’s all-male acappella group. They’re about as close as one can get to being a certifiable Drexel Rock Star. I mixed Relief simultaneously with 8ttB’s studio album that Spring, sometimes literally finding both of our material on a single ADAT tape. The group’s then-president (and my co-producer) Bill spent the entire week coaxing excellent performances out of me, partially resulting in a tacit attempt to convince me that my voice could be used as more than just an implement of singer-songwriter angst. I, for the most part, disagreed.

In the weeks to come i found myself watching in jealously and awe as 8 To The Bar added new members — almost all of them in my singing range. It had never occurred to me to audition. The grace saving me from actual disappointment about this were The Treblemakers — 8ttB’s just-formed female counterparts. The Treblemakers were composed almost exclusively of my close friends (save for Selina), and as they began rehearsing i quickly became their groupie-at-large … locating errant members after practice began, fetching extra photocopies, and reserving seats for them at the 8ttB concert. By the following fall i was an actual member of the TM’s, albeit an honorary one, and i still gave no though to auditioning for 8ttB despite them adding two more people who sing the same voice part as me in addition to our collective friend Dante, to whom i cannot claim any semblance of vocal comparison.

As 8 To The Bar’s membership became updated, so did The Treblemaker’s … adding one of my roommates, one of the first people i met at Drexel, and one of my best friends. As the group’s membership shifted so did my honorary “role” … I went from being a photocopier to an arranger, and from fetcher of members to emergency practice percussionist. However, when the curtain went up i was still a seat filler rather than a performer — one role completely alien to me..

Yesterday night the girls held their yearly audition, and as of Monday morning they will officially be up to full vocal power. Meanwhile, 8 To The Bar is pretty much at full vocal power, but they’re also auditioning. In fact, auditions are Monday night right after Choir, as an email supplied by the 8ttB webmaster conveniently informed me this afternoon. From various grapevines i have heard that they’re looking for either a couple of exceptional tenors or as many as five or six new members. As tempting as this might seem, the odds really aren’t in my favor: i don’t have a stronger voice or range than any of the baritones currently in the group, and my reading and performing skills are equal at best to any basses who are planning to show up. But, for once, i’m actually considering the possibility of showing up.

Monday, effectively, is it. I’m in my second to last year at Drexel, and i vocally scratched and clawed my way into choir. Although i am by no means a fully qualified bass or baritone soloist, i am for the first time entirely capable of being a member of 8 To The Bar, and that leaves me with a choice: I can spend Monday night making them believe that i’m only not a part of the group yet because i haven’t tried out, or i can give it up entirely and get comfortable in my seat.

So many words to describe such an agonizingly small decision; it all comes down to a simple question of “will i, or won’t i.” Will is putting myself out on a line much more personal than the ones i’ve toed in auditions for theatre and choir, and won’t is admitting that after two years of becoming more musical i’m still not musical enough.

I really don’t want to grow a tail.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/385530228/

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I am the sort of person that, once i have something fixed in my head, it overwhelms everything else in my life. That’s what happens when i ‘crush’, so to speak. I can safely reveal to you that this sort of attention is rarely paid to anything resembling work. When i’m at work i can become so focused on something that i’ll skip lunch breaks and leave later than expected, and i have been known to grow so engrossed in writing a paper that i forget to sleep or use the bathroom. However, the way crushing works is that it subverts other intended activities — and getting the records organized at work never crosses my mind when i’m working on a decent logic puzzle in the same way that writing a paper usually doesn’t distract me from writing a song.

Having spent all that time setting up what doesn’t usually distract me to no end, now let me (predictably) contradict myself: in the past week an official job i have has superseded everything else i could possibly be doing: working, sleeping, eating, spending time with Elise, and even getting near Blogger. The job, as it were, is to arrange Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” a cappella for eight or more women’s voices so that everything about the song – guitars, drums, harmony, et al – is represented in full by the singers.


It was not easy. In fact, looking back over the last week i would say i’ve easily spent upwards of fifteen hours on this barely three minute song with its half-octave of lead vocal notes and its five essential chords. Fifteen hours in front of my computer playing back the same collections of three and four measures back over and over as i first change a sixteenth note to an eighth note, and then from a major fourth to a major third of harmony.

Almost a solid day’s worth of arranging later and i have suddenly realized that Drexel had managed to teach me something, because i couldn’t do any of this three years ago – or even two. Possibly not even one. I haven’t mentioned it lately, but i’m currently in choir. Yes, choir. Singing in a group of over twenty people, some of whom are very highly distinguished singers who have been in such groups for well over a decade. I, by contrast, have been in such a group for going on five weeks. I start each session frazzled and rigid and end each one relieved and smiling and ready to belt out just about anything.

Conclusion? Some things do change, but the most basic of things always wind up the same.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85252415/

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There is someone asleep in my shower.

Actually, he’s not in my shower… he’s more half-in my shower, with his legs splayed out over my seafoam green rug in such a way that i cannot possibly get in to grab my toothbrush and face wash.

Apparently it was a good party.

I’ve never thrown a party before; the small gathering i arranged last month paled in comparison to this one. This, though, was a party … furniture rearranging, obsessive vacuuming, nearly eighty assorted jello shots, fifty dollars just in soda and chips, and two refrigerators full of assorted beer-like substances. I have yet to figure out how many people were here… twenty just from assorted a cappella groups, another ten certified friends of the house, and lots of random non-house friends. A large group of people, to be sure. And, funny things, too. For one, our extra room got turned into a concert hall when i brought all but two of my guitars out to play, and sudden i was being treated to a whole spectrum of songs — from a multiple-MC version of “That Thing” to what amounted to a full-band treatment of “The Only Gay Eskimo.” Recitals of Weezer songs upstairs. Me parading around nearly naked with a pair of underwear on my head.

I didn’t drink a drop.

Right now everything that i spent all day cleaning looks like it was swept over with an alcohol tinged cyclone, and we three roommates have decided to not do a damned thing about it until tomorrow morning when we wake up.

I don’t suppose that our friend in the shower is opposed to the plan.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/10324999/