Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Help Write a Symphony, Part 2 - #twittercomposition continues!

I've posted before about British composer Sam Watts and his cooperative composition project. Basically, he's looking for 420 different people (who use Twitter) to send in one note for his crowd-sourced composition.

It's been a while since he's posted an update, but as of February 1, 2011, he's received 219 notes. The rules for contributing are pretty straight-forward. As Watts explains in his blog A Composer's Campfire,

I’m asking as many Twitter users as possible to tweet me with a musical note (A-G, naturals, sharps and flats) and these notes will, in the order I receive them, be the melody of the composition.  It will be a three or four movement symphony (depending on how many notes I get).
Tweet me (@i_is_sam) with your choice of note (you can even specify note duration if you like) and include the hashtag #twittercomposition! Only one note per tweeter please! Then please tweet about it to all your followers to get them involved.  That’s it. I’ll do the rest. 
You can also just do a search for #twittercomposition to find out more.

So what can you do to move this project forward?

1) If you have a Twitter account and use it regularly, send a tweet to @i_is_sam with your note, and the hashtag #twittercomposition

2) If you're one of those people who opened a Twitter account and only tweeted a couple of times before giving up, for goodness sake revisit it and tweet Watts a musical note!

3) If you're either 1) or 2), please send the word out to your followers and ask them to get the word out to their followers as well. Here's how to do it. Just send the following:

Please RT: Send @i_is_sam a musical note for #twittercomposition

4) If you're not on Twitter, but know someone who is, clue them into the project and ask them to send Watts a musical note.

5) If you're not on Twitter, but are on some other form of social media, like Facebook (or even MySpace), post a link to this blog post, with a little bit of info.

I've already sent in my note, and sent the word out to all my followers on Twitter to do the same. So the only thing I can do to further help the project along is to do a blog post. Like this one.

2 comments:

  1. Re: Why Do We Hate Modern Classical Music? http://blog.mises.org/15667/why-do-we-hate-modern-classical-music/#more-15667

    Ralph

    You all might enjoy this blog and the comments.

    ART THOMAS

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  2. Art:

    Thanks for the link! I had read Alex Ross' original posting in the Guardian, but I don't think I've commented on it. There's a held-over perception from the 1960's that modern music has to sound like a toolbox descending a staircase, but that's hardly fair to listener-friendly composers like Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, Joel Greenberg, Lowell Liebermann, and many others.

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