Author: Joseph Sowa

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How to Be Productive and Sane While Working From Home

With COVID-19 sweeping the world, many of you many have joined me where I’ve been in for the past three years: working from home. As everyone is discovering, it’s tough.

Here are five tips I can offer from my experience as grad student and freelancer.

1: Log Your Hours

The temptation of having a fully flexible calendar is for you or others to equate “flexibility” with “endless free time.” You must work to disabuse yourself and others of this idea. Make and keep appointments with yourself.

Get a time-tracking app (or use a consistent notebook or spreadsheet) and log your billable hours (exclude bathroom trips, meals, non–work-related email and internet, etc.).

Logging billable hours is more useful than tracking your overall start and stop times, because it gives you a better indication of how much you’re actually working in a day. Everyone already knows that an “8-hour work day” doesn’t mean you’re working for a solid 8 hours. In practice, once you factor in the coffee and bathroom breaks, the unavoidable interruptions, the pointless meetings, and so on, an “8-hour work day” represents about 6 billable hours.

So when you’re working from home, shoot for that number. It should get you about where you need to be in terms of daily output.

2: Set a Morning Start Time and Don’t Sleep In

The most important appointment you set with yourself is the one first thing in the morning. If you don’t log at least a couple billable hours in the morning, it’s nearly impossible to log 6 billable hours by the evening.

Whether it’s an early bird hour (6 AM? 5 AM?) or a more night-owl friendly one (say, 9 or 10 AM), be sure to log at least one hour in the morning. You’ll thank yourself by the evening.

3: Take Your Downtime Seriously

The second most important appointment you set with yourself is in the evening. When you work from home, it can be tempting to just keep going. For your health and sanity, do not do that. Once you’ve reached whatever billable hour goal you set for the day,  you are free. Go take care of yourself: exercise, read a book, spend time with a loved one.

When working from home, it is crucial that you respect your human needs for food, exercise, sleep, and play. Otherwise, working from home quickly becomes unsustainable.

When I was working on my dissertation, I often had very little social time. I felt lucky if I could get in 2 social events per week. Despite that, it was some of the happiest months of my life, because I was otherwise taking care of myself. I had a routine that ensured I was well-fed, exercised, and had sufficient sleep.

Be sure to do the same for yourself.

4: Schedule Time to Talk with Colleagues

One of the benefits of working at an office or at a school is that you are surrounded by colleagues. They act as sounding boards and positive social peer pressure (“Hannah’s working right now, so I should be, too”). Even a five-minute chat about the latest TV episode or your friend’s weekend plans can work wonders for your productivity.

When you work from home or even a library or coffee shop, you miss these social benefits.

So schedule it in. Make appointments with your friends to meet up during the week. Call or FaceTime with them (better than texting because it has a clear start and finish).

Their input will increase your output.

5: Let Life Happen

You will have sick days and stuck days and surprise errand days. The goal isn’t to make a schedule and stick to it perfectly. So when life happens, embrace it and move forward:

  • Can’t log 6 billable hours today? Instead try for 4 or 2 or even 15 minutes. All progress counts and keeps the momentum going for days when the wind is at your back.
  • Feeling overwhelmed? Let yourself take a few mental health hours or even days. Do tasks that have a clear start and end.
  • Feeling stuck in loop? Do you feel the pull to waste time? Give that urge your attention, name it, and let it go. Stand up and walk around a little. At least, stare away from your computer screen and do some breathing meditation for a minute or two.

Conclusion: Learn Your Process

These suggestions represent what has worked well for me. Use them merely as a starting point. At the end of each work day, take a few minutes to reflect on what worked well and where you struggled. Where you had issues, tweak your practice for the next day. After a week or two, if one strategy isn’t working, try a different one.

As you look for additional strategies and ideas, here are the two best books I would recommend:

  • Getting Things Done by David Allen. A little dense at times, you don’t need to apply everything Allen suggests to get a lot of value from it. For me, the most useful was his methodology of how to most effective write and manage your to-dos.
  • Staying Composed by Dale Trumbore. Written with composers in mind, it falls into that larger genre of books on the creative process (like Stephen King’s On Writing or Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit). Trumbore offers dozens of practical, actionable suggests that relate directly to working from home and that will make an impact, regardless of whether you are an artist.

As the amount of time we must work from home seems to be getting longer rather than shorter, I wish you the best of luck! As someone who’s been here already, I can say confidently, you can do it!

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Celebrating Ten Years

Ten years ago, on March 31, 2010, I launched josephsowa.com as the home for my music. At the time, I was a few months out from graduating with my undergraduate degree from BYU.

A lot has happened since then! Here are some of the highlights:

I attended Brevard in summer 2011. Here John Shin (violin), David Dzubay (cond.), and the Brevard Orchestra read through the first draft of my violin concerto, Myths and Legends, which ended up being my master’s thesis.
After the premiere by the BYU Chamber Orchestra, several months later (Fall 2011). (L-R: Stephen Jones, my thesis advisor; myself; Jared Starr, violinist; Kory Katseanes, conductor)
In April 2012, I graduated BYU a second time with my MM. (L-R: Steven Ricks, Michael Hicks, me, Curtis Smith, Christian Asplund)
I started my PhD at Brandeis in Fall 2013. While there I get to collaborate with fabulous musicians including, here, Keith Kirkoff and Jeralee Johnson . . .
. . . here, Ensemble Dal Niente (who premiered An Integrity of Clouds)
. . . and here, Ludovico Ensemble for my dissertation piece, Glimmer, Glisten, Glow
While at Brandeis, I also took a couple of continuo courses that lay the foundation for my mature understanding of harmony. Here is a screenshot from that time of me exploring different harmonic relationships
Of the many pieces I wrote for summer festivals, I had the most fun writing Blossom Music for Fresh Inc. in 2017. In that piece, I got to write for flower pots while setting some of Emily Dickinson’s poems about flowers.
Also, in 2017, I had my first guest residency, at Boise State. I was invited by student Jared Knight (R) and composition faculty Sam Richards (L). This trip was also my first time in Idaho
In March 2019, I successfully defended my dissertation, graduating that May. (L-R: Yu-Hui Chang, David Rakowski, Eric Chasalow, myself, Erin Gee, Martin Brody)
Most recently, earlier ths month, I finished the first of two pieces this year for Hub New Music: this one, 3,000 Miles for flute and harp.

. . . what more will happen this decade? Stay tuned to find out! I’m just as curious as you are.

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Speak Your Musical Truth

A musical idea is not just something you visualize in your brain or even something you hear in your mind’s ear. It is both those things and more.

It is most of all something you feel in your GUT.

It is as instinctive and as personal and as urgent as the words you speak.

Sometimes you cannot immediately articulate that gut-level feeling, but it is nonetheless real, viscerally TRUE — waiting for you to give it its fullest expression, whether in words or in music.

For this reason, questions about “clichés” and “originality” and “groundbreaking-ness” are utterly beside the point.

When you speak your musical truth from your heart, what else matters?

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Those times composers wrote a low F for violin

Every orchestration textbook will tell you that the lower limit of the violin (scordatura aside), is a G3 (G below middle C).

But even with a normally tuned violin, composers don’t always obey that limit. Here are two examples (plus a bonus one in viola) that show why a composer might write beyond that written limit.

To Preserve a Melodic Line

In Richard Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica he writes (at reh. 74) this:

Strauss example.jpg

As Ernest Toch points out in The Shaping Forces of Music, “It is the pitch-line, its curve or curves, its shape, its profile, its ascensions and descensions which determine the character, the gesture of the melody. . . . Richard Strauss, in his ‘Sinfonia domestica’, draws the last consequence of this consideration by entrusting the violins with a note which is even below the range of the instrument and therefore cannot be produced. The passage is reinforced by the violas and horns and its sounding is thus assured. It would be intolerable, even to the composer’s eye to replace the low f# with its higher octave. He wants the line at least to be understood — playable or not” (67).

If I were writing that passage today, I might parenthesize the note to make it clear to the players that I don’t expect them to play it. Regardless, this is a valid, albeit rare, reason to write below the range of an instrument.

To Preserve the Tonal Meaning

A far more common reason to write below the written limit is to clarify the tonal meaning of a pitch. In this case, composers aren’t actually writing an unplayable note; they’re simply spelling it in an unusual manner.

For example, in the first movement of Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2 (bar 55), Borodin writes:

Borodin example.png

Likewise, in the second movement of his Serenade for Strings, Dvorak writes a low B for the viola (bar 4):

Dvorak example.png

In both cases, the composer is harnessing the notation to tell the performers something about the pitch relationships. Just last week, a fellow evensong choir member of mine identified a similar case in this tenor line in Elgar’s “Great is the Lord”:

Elgar example.png

“Why did Elgar just not write this as a G?” he asked.

In each of these three cases, the composers wanted the performers to know that these pitches did not have a chromatic relationship, but rather a diatonic one. In other words, they wanted the performers to know that the note they were playing (or singing) was acting as a leading tone to the note that followed it. In an earlier blog post, I referred to this as “structural chromaticism”: “these notes merely represent the overthrow of one diatonic collection (say, CDEFGAB) by a different diatonic collection (say, C#DEF#GAB).”

In the examples above, Borodin and Elgar both write F-double sharp to tonicize G-sharp, and Dvorak writes B-sharp to tonicize C-sharp. Now, you may note that, whereas C-sharp minor is the key of Dvorak’s entire phrase, neither Elgar or Borodin ever establish a key of G-sharp. That difference is immaterial. In tonal music, pitch functions can last as briefly as a single interval. The entire scale never has to be present, nor must the music match the prevailing key signature.

So if these tonicizations are so brief, why do these composers write them with these “strange” spellings? Why write a low F-double sharp for violin or a low B-sharp for viola? Simply put, because the diatonic spelling helps performers understand the musical meaning better than the chromatic one. In each of these three cases, the “simpler” chromatic spelling (G to G-sharp or C to C-sharp) would obscure the diatonic relationships that Borodin, Dvorak, and Elgar want us to hear.

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A Few Observations on Suspensions

Classical dissonance begins with a consonant preparation, continues to the dissonance in question, and finishes with a consonant resolution. Wikipedia says as much.

But as I was falling asleep I started wondering about the topology of suspensions — which suspensions work in which situation. There are three basic suspensions: 9-8, 7-6, and 4-3. In the chart below, I listed all the possibilities of preparation-dissonance-resolution in a somewhat scrambled order:

It turns out the topology of suspensions is somewhat bent. That is to say, not every bass interval is equally represented among each of the suspension categories:

  • Upward and downward seconds are capable of supporting any kind of suspension.
  • Fifths/fourths can support 9-8 suspensions either upward or downward, but the 4-3 suspension only works with ascending fifths/descending fourths, and the 7-6 suspension only works with descending fifths/ascending fourths.
  • Thirds are least capable of supporting suspensions. The direction of the third mandates the suspension type. The ascending third can support a 4-3 suspension. The descending third can support a 7-6 suspension.

I’m sure there’s some math to explain the asymmetrical distribution of bass intervals, but for 11:30 on a Thursday night, I’m going to leave this observation stand as is.

 

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The first two bars of Jupiter from Holst's Planets

The Elegance of Holst’s “Jupiter”: The First Two Bars

I love the opening swirl of violins in “Jupiter” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Who doesn’t?

Take a moment and listen to it:

It’s thrilling!

But what really gets me going as a composer are the details of its composition. This passage is extraordinarily elegant.

Here’s the excerpt from the score:

The first two bars of Jupiter from Holst's Planets

What makes this passage so elegant?

  1. Motive: The texture is composed of a single, three-note motive: a minor third followed by a major second. Holst presents this motive in two transpositions (starting on E and A) in two octaves (E4/A4 and E5/A5). Elegance is how the passage is composed of such a limited set of materials.
  2. Disposition: Though we hear the first two bars as a two-octave, upward run, it’s actually Holst introducing each transposition separately. The fact that the motive spans only a fourth makes it extraordinarily easy to play on the violin. Elegance is how Holst distributes the pitches in this easy-to-play manner to generate a larger effect.
  3. Rhythm vs. Meter (I): Holst casts his three-sixteenth-note motive into four-sixteenth-note beats. Each entrance initially seems like a four-sixteenth-note motive, but the ensuing music dispels that notion. Instead, we soon hear that Holst has set up a 4 against 3 polyrhythm. That is, the rhythmic placement of the motive relative to the meter keeps shifting in a 4:3 ratio. Elegance is how this simple tension creates excitement and energy.
  4. Rhythm vs. Meter (II): Though the motivic relationship to the meter forms a kind of polyrhythm, the rhythmic relationship of each transposition relative to the others remains constant. For instance, the E4 transposition always sounds A-E-G while the E5 transposition sounds E-G-A. Because each instance of the motive is the same 3 sixteenth-notes long, this 1:1 duration ratio ensures that they remain in the same micro-canonic relationship with each other. Elegance is how Holst composes the texture canonically rather than micromanaging the details.
  5. Orchestration: Coupling instruments in octaves is one of the foundations of common-practice orchestration. Holst does it constantly in The Planets. This passage can also be read as a kind of octave doubling: the canon with entrances on E and A in bar 1 is repeated an octave above in bar 2. The resulting texture’s polyrhythmic and pentatonic wash reinforce the impression that this relationship is an octave doubling of two lines rather than Holst wanting you to hear the four individual lines. The rocking strings that open Thomas Adès’s Tevot fill a similar purpose. As individual lines, they have direction, but as a composite texture, they create a grainy wash rather than discernible counterpoint. Elegance is taking a simple, common idea and presenting it in a fresh, becoming way.

As a composer, I love such elegance in other’s music and I strive for in my own. These kinds of musical ideas captivate me, because they create the kind of shimmering, ambiguous tension like light through a gemstone or waves reflected on the bottom of a pool. They represent one kind of musical depth: patterns whose components can be heard but which do not resolve into an unambiguous impression. The tension that remains creates a space where the soul can live.

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How Alan Menken Channels Chopin and Brahms in “Beauty and the Beast”

Yup. We’re talking about the music for *this* scene.

I watched the 2017 version of Beauty and the Beast recently with some friends of mine. Being the music nerd I am, the film got me thinking about its theme song. The more I studied it, the more my admiration for it grew.

Alan Menken’s music is straightforwardly diatonic and repetitive, but that simplicity disguises the Classical thought that underpins it. What makes this song deeper than your average pop tune?

Read on.
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Boise State Visit

2017 in Review

Welcome to the end of another year! It’s been a great one for me. Let me share the highlights below.

tl;dr

Just listen —

Pieces Written or Premiered

Places Went

  • Residency at Boise State University
  • New Music Gathering at Bowling Green State University
  • Fresh Inc. Festival in Wisconsin/Illinois

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Sam Richards, myself, and Jared Knight up the canyon from Boise

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The composers at Fresh Inc 2017

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Four-bar phrases in Mozart’s Sonata K. 332, movement 1.
Four-bar phrases in Mozart’s Sonata K. 332, movement 1.

“Why 4-bar Phrases?”
“The four-bar phrase has had a bad press in our time,” writes Charles Rosen. But for all the denigration, four-bar phrases are ubiquitous. Why? (Continue reading)

Coming in 2018

  • A new piece for Collage New Music
  • My dissertation piece for sinfonietta
  • A new setting of “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”
  • And more!

Thank you all for sharing the joy of music with me. I wish you all the best in 2018!

 

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Pachebel, of Pachebel’s Canon fame

How to Make an Easter Hymn from Pachelbel’s Canon

“I don’t know how you could possibly write music!”

It’s a refrain I hear often, even from talented musicians. And I can understand why they say that.

Writing music might seem like organizing thousands of isolated pitches and rhythms. For example, my latest arrangement included 2320 notes, 1273 rhythms, and 281 rests.

That’s daunting. But there is another way, and Pachelbel’s Canon and its friends reveal the centuries-old secret.

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