Reprise

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on making a digital orchestration of my master’s thesis, Volition. It’s been a blast from the past, slaving over this piece again for the first time in… not long enough.

The Finale playback / MIDI file had been hopelessly corrupt for mysterious reasons for a long time (which kind of screwed me at my thesis defense), so the plan was to use my new orchestral sound patches to start from scratch. I could at least import the notes into Logic, but I still had to work from the ground up. The idea was that it would end up being a decent listen—certainly no New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, but still a far cry better than general MIDI.

I kept telling myself, “Finally, at least, I can play a recording of it for people. Now, theoretically, if I can send it out with the score and parts, maybe someone somewhere someday will be willing to perform and record it. That would be a thing. Maybe, after that, I can actually use this piece to get some well-deserved recognition. Then, at last, I will have had something good come of all the insanity the waffling faculty put me through to get it done.”

I mostly relied on the keyboard in my bedroom to assist me, but I was also able to work on it at the office from time to time. Hey, it’s nice being unsupervised.

The more I worked on it, the more problems I discovered. The more solutions I found, the more sacrifices I had to make. I still couldn’t get any of the extended techniques to come across. I couldn’t get the pitch bends to work. The glissandi had to be emulated by chromatic flourishes instead. And where’s my trumpet mute? Don’t even talk to me about tempo markings. And combining the percussion staves into the orchestral percussion kit was not fun… nor was finding out that the general MIDI assignments would have been more appropriate. Sure, my patches sound better, but that doesn’t matter when you don’t actually have all the instruments you’re trying to use. Anvil, anyone? Ultimately, I had to hack and slash like crazy just to whittle it down to 16 channels, combining things that shouldn’t have been combined, and even letting go of a few things (like one measure of solo violin).

As the piece began to break down before my eyes, popping my optimistic bubble of zeal, my mentality would change progressively towards the pessimistic. “At least it’s better than nothing.”

The final, baffling problem: the playback still wouldn’t work for more than a few measures without telling me it was unable to process all the data in time, even after I fixed everything that would make it crap out. So what’s the problem? I don’t know. There’s nothing more I can do.

Another magnum ambition fails spectacularly. I want the last few weeks back. For that matter, I want the second year of grad school back. Volition keeps making itself exponentially more time-consuming and aggravating than it ever could have hoped to be. Still no payoff whatsoever. Bowling Green has returned to haunt me, tantalizing me with specters of gratification that are impossible to attain. Oh, the parallels… so many parallels to the actual thesis process… I just want to have a recording of my thesis!! Well, I can tell you one thing for certain: I am not going to waste another minute trying to salvage Volition. I have better things to do.

Fuck you, Bowling Green.