Make Your Weakness Your Strength

You know how sometimes in the back of your mind you know something is going to fail? It's like watching a child carry a glass of milk that's a little to big for them. You don't want to be that overprotective hovering parent, but you know that they'll probably drop it. Well this weekend I spilled the milk.

This week we continued our series of "master classes," where we become more comfortable writing for all the different groups of instruments. Last week was percussion and this week was strings. Our assignment was to pick any 8 bars from a famous string quartet and pretend like the composer didn't have time to finish it. It was our job to complete the piece in the style of that composer and make the transition seamless. We were given 4 options to choose from for the quartets: Ravel, Debussy, early Bartok, and late Bartok. For those of you unfamiliar with these guys, Ravel and Debussy our more romantic and impressionistic, while Bartok is....hmm....how shall I put this....IN YA FACE! 

Our teacher, Pete Anthony, is big into this idea of making your weakness your strength, so I picked the style I was least comfortable with: late Bartok. I found a really rockin' 8 bars of Bartok and wrote a really fun piece. Composing was all well and good, but the one caveat to these master classes is that we have to conduct them. My piece was in 2/4. This basically means I wave my hand down then I wave my hand up and repeat as necessary. Let me be clear about this: A MONKEY COULD CONDUCT 2/4. However, I am not a monkey and I have a certain quirky way of hearing things. 

I got up to conduct and it was nothing short of a train wreck. We did 5 or 6 stop and starts and I eventually had to hand off the conducting duty to Jonathan, my fellow classmate. He was amazing and got a great performance out of the players. I still felt HORRIBLE falling on my face in front of some of the best string players in the world and one of the best conductors in hollywood. Yikes.

I stood in front of Pete after the session and laid out my best excuses: "It was a tricky passage, I am not a conductor, etc..." Pete was very patient and let me finish my justification parade. All he said was: "Make your weakness your strength." So that's what I've gotta do. 

For your listening pleasure, here's my version of the Bartok string quartet. 

Also, the other big happening this week was our first USC director/composer meet and greet! We heard a ton of great pitches and met a lot of really cool film makers. I'm in talks with a few of them right now to work on their projects, but I'm also trying not to bite off more than I can chew. 

Finally, this week we also had to write a 1 minute seamless loop of music for Lennie's class. I did it in the style of Jon Brion. Here's the unlooped version. Bring out the whistles!