Fishing

[tacotortoise]

I don't like directly asking for help, but my indirect requests have met with little response so far. I really need feedback on my efforts at being a professional musician, both online and in the flesh:

If you have been to my website, what do you think of it? Is it easy to navigate? Is there some functionality or content that you feel the site

Comments

[ratatosk]

Okay. Tiny suggestion to make the page for individual works less confusing:

Where you have chosen to only provide the score for one movement, it would be easier to read if you put roman numeral movement numbers in front of the names whenever they are displayed outside of full sentences. Here, the first thing I clicked on was the score, without reading all the text above the link to it, looked at the score, tried to figure out what the three sketches were, went and read the text description, realized that Concertstuck was the first movement of a three movement work, and then finally went up and read the line saying "Movements:". Sticking a 'I.' in front of the movement title in the score link would have forced the information upon me sooner.

Horn player gripe

[ratatosk]

Okay. In measure 14 of the horn part to Concertstuck, _you have placed an open sign on a note that was not preceded by a stopped section_. Also in measure six, you have two notes with open signs on them in a row -- this is needlessly confusing. Please don't do this. It is very confusing, composers do it all the time, and actual horn players hate it. Please eradicate this habit now.

You know who is really horrible about that? Sondheim. You would have to work hard to be as confusing as Sondheim.

Other things to please not be doing:

- randomly saying "open" throughout the piece
- choosing randomly between "muted" and "con sordino" throughout a piece.
- choosing randomly between "stopped/open" and "+/°", or mixing and matching between them
- putting '+'s on notes that are in a section you have already labeled with words as muted or stopped. If you want us to use a stop mute, say so.

These are all things that other composers actually do to horn players, possibly because they hate us.

Re: Horn player gripe

[ratatosk]

I'm not kidding here. I have spent a lot of time trying to find non-existent "muted"s or "stopped"s to correspond with mysteriously-placed "open"s.

Re: Horn player gripe

[tacotortoise]

I was going to counter that whenever I have a parameter which is subject to change in a non-obvious manner, I overnotate. For example, even though accidentals apply throughout at measure unless explicitly cancelled, I tend to put accidentals on every note (or every non-natural note, anyway) when the melody and/or harmony are sufficiently complex. So, in the case of horn stopping, I would (at least with my present notational norms) want to put a marking over every note in a passage where the stopping was frequently changing. But then I thought about what the performer actually does, and realized that conceptually, horn stopping is actually more like a toggle switch. So yeah, indicating only the places where it changes are sufficient

Re: Horn player gripe

[ratatosk]

I've never actually played anything where the notes transitioned, so I have no experience to base an opinion on. And adjacent notes are not really a problem. It's just anything that leads me on a wild goose chase to make sure I understand it that I don't like.

And, like I said, I'm confident you will never descend to the level of incomprehensibility of Sondheim's horn parts. :)

[tiurin]

The biggest opinion I had of the recitals was that they were underadvertised. How do independent musicians usually advertise? Is there a local online board for Boston classical musicians to hang out on? Have your professors had any advice on how to make a go of it as an independent musician?