End Of Semester Report: Spring 2010

Hey guys, it’s time now for my apparently bi-yearly blog post. Since so much has passed, I hope you’ve got a snack and a drink because this is going to be a long one but with plenty of content and news about literally everything. I hope it matters! HA!

School was pretty intense this semester as the difficulty of the classes went up significantly, some reasons were legitimate and others were not. I can be honest in that I didn’t spend as much time doing homework as I should have, but my grades were still acceptable and I learned an awful lot. The deeper I get into learning about music proper, the science, the study and the appreciation of it, more things become clear than one might think:

Everyone thinks they know everything about music.

I can’t tell you how many attempted arguments get thrown at me about any kind of music that I like. It somehow always ends up that The Beatles (or someone just as popular) are the end-all be-all of music since the dawn of human existence and the passage of time. Electronic music gets easily written off (at least my kind of electronic music) in the face of “true performance”, which usually involves instruments and groups of people. This is usually spoken out of ignorance and confusion, both of which I’ll answer to as I’m getting to a larger point.

The more you know, the less you know.

It is truly daunting how much there is to learn about the science of music. Just in this semester of Music Theory II, the last thing we began discussing was the secondary dominant. It’s a relatively simple concept but it became literally an entirely separate dimension of almost everything I’ve learned about music thus far. I had a pretty difficult time keeping up, though – as I said before – I could have spent more time on the homework, but the textbook explains it all like stereo instructions and my professor, though very personable and fair, had a teaching style that literally put me to sleep… every day; 3:30 PM, whether anyone liked it or not, was nap time for Professor Kliq. The craziest part, though, is that the more I learn about music, the scarier it becomes. I find myself asking “well if it goes this deep and I’m only halfway through Music Theory, does it ever truly end?” I suppose only time will tell, but from what I’ve seen so far I can say that, no, it never truly ends.

The less you know, the more you know.

I’ve definitely comes across a fairly decent cross section of musicians (and I’ll call them that to be fair) who quickly write off any sort of formal music study, saying things like “if you don’t hear it, you don’t get it” or “I don’t need a textbook to teach me what I already know”. I stand firmly and go on record to say – if you refuse to learn, you already suck at what you do. I will go toe-to-toe with anyone on this because I have seen it with my own eyes and can say that the blind will obviously never see as well as those who can. Learning modal structures and intervals and cadences and orchestration structure and technique and balance and forms and sonatas and canons and fugues and rondos… I couldn’t honestly give you a straight-forward answer as to how any one of those concepts would individually benefit me as an artist, a composer, a musician or a person… but together, all as one critical mass, I have found that my ideas have become more refined and more organized. I’ve become more critical of my own work, finding things – not in the production value, per se – but in the true grain of the music itself. After all, I’m more focused on the story than the font. In the end, what I’ve learned has shown me an entirely new world and it frustrates me to no end when I hear someone ignorantly denounce what I have truly devoted my life to. I’m not saying I’m better than them, I’m just saying they’ll never be as good as they could be.

“I’m already good enough.”

Sigh.

Live Shows have become bothersome and frustrating. I really don’t have the local following to keep doing it out here (in Chicago). I ultimately have to rely on friends from my hometown to truck their happy asses all the way out to the city through miles of construction and traffic just to pay five dollars to see what they’ve already seen a dozen other times. This is not what I would call “getting myself out there”. The time has come for an agonizing reappraisal as to how to expose myself (ha!) in a live setting…

Hmm…

Well, the internet has been pretty good to me so far (thanks guys) as far as just getting my productions out there, so why not graduate to video? I picked up a Sony Bloggie HD to match with my relatively new Sony Vaio to record videos of what (and how) I do in a live setting. I already did a test recording of my live mash-up of “Oh Yeah” by Yello, featuring some of my other favorite newer dance tracks from present day. It’s only had about 400 views to date, but hey – that’s reaching way more eyes than an empty bar would.

Now that school is out and summer has started, you can expect to see more of these videos, whether they’re just performance videos or tutorials. Also I’ll be looking into how to use screen capture software.

…and to wrap this up (with plenty more to say after two months of no posting), here’s the video, recording and score of my most recent project for Composition II. It took me about two months to complete in the midst of getting ready for shows, school and other projects. I wanted to go for something a little more “out there” compared to my last piece (which I still have to get a copy of).

Uninvention #2 (Never A Real Composer) by Professor Kliq

The Full Score in PDF

This work by Professor Kliq is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

I’ve got some projects in the works at the moment – trying my best to get myself into the music industry. I might be doing some documentary work for a show in New Zealand… a solid start to a dream coming true.

Thanks for reading and, above all:

Thanks for listening.

3 Comments »

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1. Just getting around to reading this post, and listening to the composition. Amazing, man, amazing.

   Can’t wait to maybe hear some of this in person, when I move to Chi-town next week.

   Comment by Nicholas Young — June 10, 2010 #

2. Hey Kliq,

   glad to read from you You wrote that you’re searching for screen-capture software. Did that too for a long time and FINALLY came across something that is the best one I’ve seen so far: Camtasia. Just google it.

   Really love your music and what you do!

   Cheers,
   Zeis

   Comment by Zeis — June 22, 2010 #

3. WOW… Nice one. I love that song. I mean, is it a song? can you call it a song? It’s better than just a song. Well you definetly have to come to germany. You have some fans here…

   cheers, Pascal.

   Comment by Pascal — July 28, 2010 #

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