Welcome to Bearded Crow’s blog

Three Pie, by Jeff Moylan, from Rock Feels No Pain

(Bearded Crow, copyright 2013 moylanmedia.com)

Ah, Yeah (Trois Mondes, copyright 2008, moylanmedia.com) was written as a fantasy lullaby for orchestra and chorus. Slow and somnolent,  this piece may encourage bitter-sweet dreams.

The compositions calls for chamber ensemble, some forty voices, a church organ, and surround-sound recording. My meager virtual studio can hardly do it justice.

“Impecunious”    Bearded Crow   from  Mass Reaction, 2011

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some of the Bearded Crow available on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKaXvmCK23gaFenLOpCvEaQ/playlists?sort=dd&view=50&shelf_id=3579731707244514300

Bearded Crow creates musical experiences using digital audio technology with the intention of expressing musical ideas clearly, fully, and succinctly.

All of the compositions are based upon principles that represent a “philosophy” of music, one that attempts to take the historical sweep of musical development into account

Some of Bearded Crow’s fundamental precepts:

Harmonic/musical utterances predate language in human evolution

Humanity’s sonic palette is ever-evolving, and definitions of euphony, harmony, and dissonance shift over time

People exhibit individual rhythmic “fingerprints”, yet they understand a vast rhythmic vocabulary that is shared across different rhythmic languages (and different species)

The tonality of a given instrument is somewhat subjective- likewise, the musical frequency assigned to a given note may change

The direction of musical evolution moves from harmonically/mathematically simple intervals toward intervals represented by complex ratios and smaller tonal divisions

Musical instruments also evolve as refinements are made, and their natures, in terms of articulation and tonality, also change according to subjective criteria

We overlook (overhear?) a certain amount of noise when we play musical instruments, thus knowingly adding and accepting a layer of non-musical sound to our music

Musical composition anticipates both the listener and the listening environment

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“Sling Slide”     Trois Mondes,    copyright 2011 moylanmedia

(example of orchestral composition)

Why synthesist? What does that mean? Why synthesizers? To one who has played an instrument in a chamber ensemble, a jazz band or a full orchestra,  isn’t the intrinsic musical value of organic instruments apparent, and aren’t traditional musical instruments representative of skill and artistry both in their manufacture, and in their employment? What possible charm could synthetic instruments have that might possibly outweigh the considerations of the intimacy between the musician and the instrument, the truth and beauty of pure musical expression, the discipline and mastery evident in performance? Does such mastery not honor the composer, and demonstrate the merit of the art? And furthermore doesn’t synthesis cheapen art by offering merely to copy existing instruments and to simplify them? To shorten the learning curve, as it were?

 

 

Lessons, scales and arpeggios, etudes and recitals… none of these came into consideration. Rather, a  baby grand piano was as impossible to turn down as it was to move in, merely because it was free. For a family of modest means, a grand piano represented a subtle but sure-fire method of scaling class barriers; either by training up the youngsters to exceed their pedestrian ambitions, or by luring talented individuals from the world at large into the home. (Move it in, have it tuned, and they will come!)
And come they did; bringing guitars and flutes, lovely contraltos and stentorian tenors, barrel-house rags and chamber-group finesse.
So over the course of one summer the unruly teen-aged Bearded Crow eagerly absorbed the nine weeks of elementary lessons he received from a recent high-school graduate. With a completed Thompson’s “Little Fingers” primer under his belt, he considered himself sufficiently indoctrinated to tackle whatever remained of keyboard study through self-education.

An example of the musical guests, and the music they performed:

De Profundis © 2005 by Carolyn Brown Senier

 

While obsessed with the Theremin, the teen Bearded Crow needed an instrument that was not only electronic, but also capable of modulation, one that was articulate, portable, and cool. The Moog Modular was at the pinnacle of musical desire, but it was hardly an instrument that lent itself to casual jamming.

 the Moog Modular synthesizer

For years the money earned from caddying at the public golf course, hot-dog vending at the college football stadium, lawn-mowing and snow-shoveling went into a keyboard acquisition fund. But in the meantime other instruments were freely available (and with free instruction): school band instruments such as the clarinet, saxophone, and oboe.
Before long the salesmen at the music store became hip to the kid who came in every week to play the Hohner Clavinet, promising to purchase it soon.

Would all of the hard-earned teen savings go toward a Clavinet? How about a Lorée oboe, straight from France? A tenor sax? There were many demands upon a young man’s meager funds. Records, and girls, clothing, posters and pot. What about Varèse, and Zappa? What about ‘Whither Music?’ What would Chick Corea do?

“Free” lessons on the clarinet , oboe, and saxophone required performance, whether in the form of solo recitals, chamber ensembles, intramural symphony orchestras, or the football booster band. There were all-city and all-state orchestras, all-city jazz band, plus regional jazz band competitions.  In competition the musical selections tended to come from an earlier era- usually post-war American swing. The orchestral ensembles sometimes ventured to Elgar, Copeland and Ives, but typically performed Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Vivaldi.

Garage-band participation also placed demands, and required learning top-40 songs, such as “Stairway to Heaven”,” Sweet Devotion”, “We’re An American Band”,” LA Woman”,” Oye Como Va?” “Fire”, “Jumping Jack Flash”, etc.
However the instrument of choice became the Arp Odyssey– a questionably polyphonic synthesizer with stereo output and an expression pedal. With the Arp one could create the sound of an audience, or a helicopter, a wind storm, or better yet, a whiny organ (the Farfisa sound was in vogue back then). It could produce a passable bass, a funky, chunky middle counterpoint to the guitar, or a brassy lead.

However, the Odyssey was difficult to tune, and once tuned it tended to drift. In performance the Odyssey was unreliable and unmanageable, and was much better suited for the studio. On the other hand, it was a true synthesizer, an oscillator-based tone generator that utilized “envelope signal modulation” and ASDR wave-shaping. (Attack, Sustain, Decay, Release.)

Bearded Crow- “Third Ear Heard Here”,   from Third Ear, copyright 2009 moylanmedia

 

At age 10 Bearded Crow was playing drums for a cover band that mauled current hits such as “Sugar, Honey, Honey” “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” and “Aquarius (Let The Sun Shine)”. But this pop-music pablum hardly squared with what he was hearing on vinyl records borrowed from the local public library:

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band Safe As Milk