Clockworthy Pursuits

How British is the name Clockworthy Pursuits? Well, I think it rings with old world wit. I openly admit to listening to Harrison Birtwistle a lot leading up to composing the piece that holds that name. Birtwistle is really interesting to me, with directional processes that as audio excerpts may sound random but over the duration really move.

Clockworthy Pursuits is a chamber work for saxophone, clarinet, bassoon, and violin. A lot of my music is colored by the weird assortments of musicians who I had befriended. More importantly, this piece was an expansion of a permutational technique I had developed in the piano piece Sitting Too Close to the TV. The piano work was quite similar to the etudes that Ligeti was currently composing, but also had parallels to Birtwistle's piece Harrison's Clocks, of which I had seen a score in the library. In the case of Clockworthy Pursuits, I combined layers of alternating processes into one line, overlaid with a rhythmic scheme designed to shuffle beat emphasis, and then systematically divided the line between the performers.

The modern musician can take a lesson from this piece. It is very important to have a diversified skill set. He might not use all of his skills at once, but he will use and develop them permutationally as he moves from job(s) to job(s). Proficiency in my primary interest, composition, is an important motivator for me but has provided me with very little cash. My knowledge of acoustics, DAWs, and audio recording got me a job teaching electronic music. Understanding music theory in depth and having taught it in a low pressure situation at the University of Georgia Community Music School, qualified me to teach it at the Baltimore School for the Arts. My continuing obsession with developing audio and visual applications with Pure Data has provided me with opportunities to showcase my work and to do paid work for others, providing them with software that performs in ways no other software can. As I look for jobs, I am finding that I have other skills that I have developed in jobs that I have held and hobbies that I have pursued. I can type more than sixty words a minute. I now have a year of administrative experience. I know how to hand code an html/css website, create simple equations in Excel, design things in Adobe Photoshop, and more. I even think my hours of experience with different types of computer games may have provided me with other unseen skills.

I had been depressed for a while, at the beginning of my unemployment, because I felt like I had not developed any skills beyond music. I felt that my pursuits and not been clockworthy. For anyone who feels this way, I recommend doing a job search, whether he is in need of a job or not, and he will find his hidden abilities that he may not be using currently that are applicable to alternative occupations.

I feel nostalgia for an idealized time in which I did not live, a time when people got a job and stayed with it until retirement. The reality of that time is probably closer to how we live now, where many people do not get to settle into comfortable careers so quickly. Instead, we all have the exciting opportunity to explore many different jobs and develop a variety of skills. What a great cure for boredom!