Thanks.

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Over the past week, I have received messages from several people who performed Resurrection Hymn this past Sunday for Easter.  I am grateful for your willingness to use my music.  It is humbling to have so many excellent musicians bringing my music to life, including my own Ward Choir.

Resurrection Hymn is available in vocal solo, SAB, SSA, and TBB arrangements.  The SATB version will be available soon.  Again, thank you all for making Resurrection Hymn one of the most performed pieces I’ve written.

Under construction

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You may have noticed that a few things are moving around on nathanhowemusic.com. I’m doing some work to make the site easier to navigate. This includes revamping the way download links appear and separating multiple arrangements of the same song into separate posts so they can be cataloged individually. If you encounter any broken links during the process, please let me know. Thanks!

Who cares if you listen? Me.

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The musical landscape has changed dramatically over the past half century. In 1958, Milton Babbitt’s article known as “Who cares if you listen?” appeared. Among other things, he questioned the need for composition with an audience in mind.  With the possibility of technologically-assisted performance at very low cost, Babbitt reasoned that an audience might not be necessary in the future.

That future is here.  With the technologies available, it now seems common that composers make music without any regard for the audience. The modern art music scene is especially trending in this direction.

Maybe the problem is inherent in 21st century creativity. We constantly strive to be unique, to travel some previously undiscovered musical course.  Perhaps, some think, the universe’s pleasing combinations of notes have all been taken, and to be truly artistic, we need to use only the permutations which the old masters left alone.

Maybe it can be simply attributed to ego. The composer is simply so smart that the masses will never comprehend his work.  This elitism is common among theoreticians who also compose.

I hope that in the future, I will be seen as a composer who dabbled in music theory, rather than a theoretician who just happened to compose.  Natural composers allow their music to be governed by sound; they let their ears take the lead.  Theoreticians are often more concerned with process and procedure than product and purpose.

Please understand, I do not advocate a return to strict tonality or a stop to innovation.  I simply suggest that music must be written for a listener, even if that listener is only in the composer’s imagination while the piece is being written.  Music written exclusively for the composer’s pleasure is contrary to the nature of music.

Silent Night

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My audio Christmas card this year is an arrangement of Silent Night.  I’ve been playing with Audacity recently in preparation for some projects I’d like to do with my students at the high school.  As part of that, I started working on a Christmas example.

Oddly, I’ve been listening to a lot of Steve Reich this year, so the Silent Night arrangement was a minimalist-inspired experiment.  Before the music geeks get on my case, this piece is not true minimalism or a phase piece, and it’s probably definitely not the way Steve Reich would have approached it at all.  Steve Reich is Steve Reich, and I have little interest in copying his style.  However, his idea that a piece may stay on the same chord for sustained periods without becoming boring intrigues me.

I used ostinatos to repeat and overlap.  You may notice that the ostinatos don’t always line up numerically – the bass line repeats on a 2-measure cycle, the brass motif is on a 6-measure cycle, and the high ah singing the “Silent Night” motif repeats every 8 measures.  One verse of Silent Night is 24 measures.  It’s just a fun little experiment for me, using a low-quality PC microphone.

As far as my process on this piece, I literally arranged by performing, as though using the computer as a simple loop machine.  I did clean up my loops a bit (balancing the two voices in the brasslike motif, for instance), but most of the sound loops remained minimally processed.  I did occasionally use a chorus plugin and the standard Audacity compressor and leveler.

Each new loop I sang was built on the previous ones, in the final order of the song.

Enjoy, comment, and have a merry Christmas!

http://nathanhowemusic.com/blog/2011/12/16/silent-night-merry-christmas-2011/

Preoccupied.

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I don’t often talk politics here, but current events have me thinking a lot.

Right now, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its split-offs in other cities are dominating the news.  Everybody has an opinion, and everybody wants to know which side you’re on.

We oversimplify in talking about these protests.  We really need to separate the event itself from its participants.  There are some very sincere people in the “occupy” movement who believe that they are making the world a better place by their participation.  When it comes down to it, I don’t think too many people have evil intents.  Of course, sometimes the sincerest efforts lead to bad results.

As I look at this movement as a whole, it seems more destructive than productive.  Some of their grievances are valid; hey, I’d like to make more money, too.  But their methods seem to take the childish “if I can’t have it, you shouldn’t either” approach.  It doesn’t work on the playground, and it doesn’t work on Wall Street.

As far as the underlying issues, it’s all about supply and demand.  Corporations will continue doing what they are currently doing (for good or for evil) if we keep paying them to do it.  But most American consumers buy based on price, not principle.  If a shirt is cheaper at a store that uses financial or labor practices you oppose, do you go and buy a more expensive shirt across the street?  Most Americans don’t.

As a people, we have basically decided that our primary values as consumers are convenience and price.  We have followed those values at the expense of other noble ideas, like the desire to buy domestic goods to support our own economy.

If I go to the store and buy primarily foreign-made goods and then local factories begin to close, is that the fault of the store, the factory owner, or the consumer?  If I buy an imported car and my local Ford dealer closes, is it the Toyota dealer’s fault?

Occupy Wall Street is really just a symptom of a country that has its priorities misaligned.  Instead of solving the priority problem, the “occupiers” are fighting against those to whom we have willingly given our money, based on the values we have followed.

To summarize, America will not become stronger by knocking down those who succeed.  We will become stronger by fixing the root causes of our failures.  Perhaps the first step is simply to remember who we are.  May God bless us to live up to our individual and collective potential.

Google+, Control-

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In case you’ve been completely disconnected for the past couple of weeks, Google+ is the next big social networking platform. Some people think it will kill Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other competitors.

Although I don’t think Facebook will be hurt enough to shut down, there is one aspect of G+ that makes it more enticing than any previous social networking tool: It’s embedded in Google.

Almost everybody who uses the internet also uses Google search. Calendar, Gmail, and other Google services are also quite popular. Now, as a Google+ user, your status updates appear in a bar at the top of most of the Google services everybody has come to rely upon.

I work in schools, and I’ve seen the evolution of content blocking. But can any corporate or school network admin really block Google? Blocking Google would handicap reasonable, everyday business or education tasks. They couldn’t get away with it.

But soon, Google+ and Google everything else will be inseparable. Google realized that social networking is largely seen as unproductive use of time, so it designed its social network to embed itself in places that we have come to see as necessary for productivity.

Don’t be evil…?

(Waste some time connecting with me on Google+)

About Easter

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OK, we can all agree that the resurrection of Christ was not necessarily on the first Sunday after the last full moon in whatever, but I still really love the Easter holiday. I am a big chocolate fan, but candy aside, I really appreciate the unity of the Christian world in celebrating the resurrection of Christ.

Sadly, there is some disagreement in the Christian world regarding what exactly resurrection is and who will be resurrected.  As a Latter-day Saint, I believe that resurrection is the reuniting of the spirit and the body in a perfect, immortal state.  Because of the Atonement of Christ, this will happen to every child of God who ever received a body.

Last year, I was asked to sing in Sacrament Meeting on Easter Sunday.  The week before, the Bishop asked what I would sing.  I said, “You want something from the hymn book, right?”  To my pleasant surprise, he said, “No, it just needs to be something hymn-like.”  The night before Easter, I still hadn’t come up with a plan.  I knew I could just use a hymn if necessary, but I really wanted something that taught the doctrine of Christ – not just a song of praise, but a song of truth, too.

As I was pondering about some of these things, and about the whole concept of Easter and of resurrection, this little song came to me.  It draws on the scriptures for many of its phrases.  I wrote it up and finished it in the early hours of Easter morning.  Several months later, I reworked a couple of small parts and submitted it to the Church – we’ll see in June if it wins anything.  Then I sang it at a cultural program in Loveland on Good Friday this year.  For a thrown-together late night project, I feel like it turned out pretty well.

Get the music and see a YouTube video of me singing it here:  Resurrection Hymn

The CSAP Song

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The counselor at Baker Central School, one of the three schools where I teach, asked me to write a positive jingle about CSAP. For those of you outside Colorado, CSAP is the standardized test that all students statewide must take, and which is the major tool to assess whether a school is succeeding or failing.

Regardless of my personal feelings about CSAP’s effectiveness, it benefits everybody when kids do their best.

Download The CSAP Song as an mp3 now

See the YouTube Video

The CSAP Song is released by Nathan Howe Music under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License, so feel free to share it with others (especially teachers) who might have a good use for it.  If you need permission to do something with the song beyond the scope of the Creative Commons license, click here to ask for permission.

By the way, some of the background vocals were provided by students at Fort Morgan Middle School, and the instrumentals were created with JamStudio.

Lyrics:

We had a great breakfast
And plenty of rest.
We’re not gonna panic:
This is only a test.

We’ve got our #2 pencils
And a smile on our face;
We’ll fill in the bubble
And cleanly erase

On CSAP.
Yeah, CSAP.
Yeah, CSAP.
Yeah, CSAP.

UPDATE:  The CSAP has become the TCAP, so the song has been revised.  Listen here.