Last night I posted some questions on the MikePortnoy.com forum (Dream Theater's drummer) and the main Dream Theater discussion forum. I've been listening to the contest entries and I continue to be impressed musically and fascinated musicologically. Basically I wanted to get some idea of how the composers felt about creating their contest entry, and how they went about interpreting the contest skeleton. Had a few responses so far. Here are the threads:

DreamTheater.net

MikePortnoy.com 

3:49:45 p.m. -- At this moment I am listening to "SoC" by a group called NuClear Dawn. This track is one of about 20 I've collected in the last couple of days, all with titles similar to "S.O.C," and all of which are entries in a songwriting contest put together by the band Dream Theater (contest closed a few days ago, so don't worry scraping together a 10-11 minute instrumental and sending it in).

When the contest was announced a few months ago, I instantly thought it was perhaps the coolest thing ever. The contest rules will give you an idea of why I thought it so great: In the course of writing a song for its upcoming album, Train of Thought, Dream Theater asked fans to write a song based on the formal skeleton of one of the Train of Thought songs, "Stream of Consciousness" (the "Stream of Consciousness" title was not public knowledge at the time the contest began, hence all the "S.O.C" titles). All that was given was a photograph of a small whiteboard with the title "SOC" and a list of the song sections in their unofficial names such as "Eb EVIL DIMEOLA," "BEATLES G# to E," or "CRIMSON SETUP (drum bass)." Many bands write out song sections in this way during composition, and these titles are meant to serve as quick verbal shorthand for specific musical parts. Also given to the eager entrants were keyboardist Jordan Rudess' MIDI sequencer charts detailing the section tempos and the exact measure length for every section (and therefore the entire song). Finally, the band supplied another image summarizing the measure-by-measure listing as the series of sections. And with nothing else save for a note that the song wouldn't have lyrics, the interpretive fun began.

Wow. This contest is a semiotician's dream. Regardless of who "wins" (the prizes are actually kind of cheap -- free tickets to a Dream Theater show and so on) the possibilities realized by the entrants have so much to say about the relationship between music, language, genre, style, etc. As someone who's written songs with a band and used the kind of verbal shorthand that's at the center of this contest, I know how wide open meaning can be when "outsiders" encounter the shorthand. The shorthand itself is an interesting phenomenon: one on hand it's minimal verbal language for describing complex musical sound, on the other hand it's hardly transparent to those outside the compositional process. In other words, Dream Theater wrote a riff that was only later labeled "CRIMSON." Not only does CRIMSON not tell us much of anything, it's not at all useful to anyone but Dream Theater.

And that's what makes the contest so interesting. How might the word CRIMSON be interpreted by the entrants? When I first saw it I thought of "Crimson Sunrise," the name of a section of DT's lengthy "A Change of Seasons." Then I thought it perhaps referred to a section that sounded like it could have been written by the band King Crimson. In both cases language needs to be translated into the complex components of music (texture, pitch, rhythm, instrumentation, timbre, etc.), but in neither case is anything certain. In fact, if one interprets CRIMSON as a reference to King Crimson, the next interpretive question has to be which King Crimson? The mid-1970s strangeness of Red, Larks Tongue, and Starless? Or the minimalism of Discipline? Or something else entirely?

And this situation is even more interesting when you consider the sections labeled with some variation of "BEATLES." So far, these sections have proved to be very difficult for the entrants to get through. By this I mean that the interpretations of BEATLES have usually ended up as much softer, less virtuosic, and far less intense than the surrounding sections. Also, according to the MIDI charts the BEATLES sections are to be played at a much slower tempo than the other sections of the song, thus making their arrivals all the more jarring. Specifically, it's been interesting hearing how the word BEATLES has generally meant diatonic chords, strummed. In one clever case ("Read the Meater") the entrant sang "ooh-la-la-la" over the chord changes, but that's so far been the only significant deviation from the "stummed chords, no distortion == BEATLES" approach. Surrounding the BEATLES section is pretty impressive (so far) progressive metal: odd time signatures, virtuosic soloing, and ensemble precision.

The only thing remaining to be heard is Dream Theater's own interpretation of the words BEATLES, CRIMSON, as well as all of the other titles. Train of Thought is due out in a couple of weeks, so we'll see what happens. The immediate question that I'll have relates to the authority of the "author." Dream Theater's interpretation of the section titles will be just that: interpretations, and the 20-odd fans who also spent hours and hours creating their own interpretations of those titles cannot be said to have been "wrong" once Dream Theater's version is released (of course, the point of the contest was not to be "right"). Still, if Dream Theater really wanted to cede authorial control over the song "Stream of Consciousness," they'd compile the contest entries and include them with the Train of Thought CD.

I'll write back when the album comes out... 

So, in my effort to build a recognizable and easily identifiable "brand" image now that I'm looking for work, I've decided I need business cards. There are free services out there (1, 2) that will print you 200-250 basic business cards, but you have to work within their templates. Most of the templates are structured for people who actually have jobs, so those of us who are "in transition" either need to work with the inherent structure of the template or go somewhere else. I did try to work within the inherent structure of the template, but combined with the somewhat blasé free designs, my "situation" didn't seem to map well enough.

So I downloaded a shareware program called Business Card Composer. It's remarkably flexible and smart, allowing you to import background images, lighten them, make them black and white, etc. There are also very smart drawing tools and text tools (for instance, changing fonts on the entire business card is very easy). Overall I'm impressed with this app, and I'll probably pay for it. This is important because in order to use the online business card services with your own art work, you gotta pay. Thus, I need to pay for the software ($39.95 to remove the "unregistered" mark from the final image) and then pay for the business card people to print my art work. I know, I know, I could just pop down to the local office supply store and buy some business card paper, re-make the art work in Fireworks, import everything into Word, and then print it myself. The biggest problem with all that (aside from the tedious reconstruction of the art work) is that I don't have a color printer that's good enough. The online people will laser it on nice paper, which is better than the cheapo Avery paper I'm sure.

So, after all that explanation, here's what I've come up with (please excuse the fuzziness and de-saturation of the colors):

 

What is the deal with the rampant occurrences of "rediculous"? Gawd that bothers me. More than "alot" or "its/it's" or " "Julie" called". 

Making mix CDs is fun, right? Early in my UCLA graduate school career I worked with a professor named Jim Westby, and he was very into the idea of making mix tapes (we didn't have recordable CDs back in those days). In fact he'd often make it part of a class' final project. In other words, the students, in addition to doing whatever else was part of the final project, had to make a mix tape for him. The contents of the tape could be anything, related to the class or not, but the point was that they were an individualized creation. Now that I think about it, he was basically including a "composition" component into a music history class. From what I could tell, the students liked this part of the final project and Jim had hundreds of mix tapes sitting in his office before he left UCLA. I wonder what happened to them...

Anyway, so Andy asked me if he could borrow some Meshuggah (Swedish "alternative" metal band). Sure, I said. Time goes by for a bit and then I remember that Andy wants to hear Meshuggah. Rather than lend him Destroy Erase Improve (which he might not return as in the case of my Somewhere In Time album, Andy), I decide to make him a mix of Meshuggah (the later stuff is very different from the DEI album). Andy's a drummer and he'd heard Meshuggah does some pretty weird stuff rhythmically, so I felt it important to give him a guided listening experience. And that's another interesting thing about mix tapes/CDs (aside: I still can't get used to saying "mix CD." It's not as smooth to me as "mix tape." Dunno why.): when made for friends they can be tools of education. Kinda like that Frasier episode where Frasier uses Christmas gifts to enlighten his family -- giving Martin the expensive robe, for example. Except with Frasier, he was giving the gifts he did because he thought the receiver should have them, rather than giving his family gifts he knew they themselves would really like.

So, mix CDs (<-- I'm trying) can be tools of enforced education. Thus, for Andy's Meshuggah mix, I included the first three tracks from DEI, the first two from None, and then found two tracks each from Chaosphere and Nothing. Now, here's where the enforced education comes in: I then included three extra tracks that are by other bands: Dimmu Borgir, Opeth, Fates Warning. *I* really like all three of these bands (I also like Meshuggah a lot), and I included them on the mix CD because I think the drummers are pretty amazing. I don't know what Andy will think of the music (he'll probably listen quickly once), but with a mix CD it doesn't matter because it's enforced education. Brilliant.

Now to take over the rest of the world... 

How cool is this. Project Gutenberg rocks... 

www.appleturns.com

I tune in every day in the late afternoon for three scenes of Jack's witty banter and journalistic "integrity."